human
Education. (2) _Sackville's Induction_ to a series of political tragedies, called
gpt
A Mirror for Magistrates. The poet goes down into hell like Dante, and meets Remorse, Famine, War, Misery, Care, Sleep, Death, etc., and talks with noted Englishmen who had fallen. This
human
Mirror was of great fame and influence in its day; and the
gpt
Induction, though far inferior to both Chaucer and Spenser, is yet the best poetic work done in the time between those masters. (3) _John Lyly's Euphues_, a book that expressed the thought of Ascham's
human
Schoolmaster in a style peculiar for its puns, antitheses, and floweriness,--a style which made a witty handling of language the chief aim of writing. Lyly was a master of the art, and the ladies of the court committed his sentences in great numbers, that they might shine in society. The book has given a word to the language; that affected word-placing style is known as _euphuistic_. The book has no claims upon our reading. (4) _Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia_, a romance in the same conceited style as the
gpt
Euphues, and only valuable as a mine for poetic images. (5) _Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity_, which was a defence of the church system against the Puritans. The latter said that no such system of church government could be found in the Bible, and therefore should not exist. Hooker answered that Nature was a revelation from God as well as the Bible; and if in Nature and society there were good reasons for the existence of an institution, that was enough. The book is not of importance to the general reader to-day, for the truth of its principles is universally admitted. (6) _The Plays of Marlowe_, a very powerful but gross writer. His
human
Dr. Faustus may very properly receive attention, but only after the best plays of Shakspeare, Jonson, Calderon, Racine, Molière, Corneille, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes have been carefully read. (7) _The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher_, which are filled with beauty and imagination, mingled with the immodesty and vulgarity that were natural to this age. The remark just made about Marlowe applies here. (8) _Fox's Book of Martyrs_, which for the sake of breadth should be glanced at by every one. The marvellous heroism and devotion to faith on one side, and cruelty on the other that come to us through the pages of this history, open a new world to the modern mind. (9) _Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene_, which combines the poetry of a Homer with the allegory of a Bunyan. It presents moral truth under vast and beautiful imagery. In English poetry it claims our attention next to Shakspeare and Milton. (10) _Ben Jonson's Plays_, which stand next to those of Shakspeare in English drama. (11) _The Plays of Shakspeare_, which need no comment, as they have already been placed at the summit of all literature; and (12) _Bacon's Works_, including the _Novum Organum_, the _New Atlantis_, and the _Essays_, the first of which, though one of the greatest books of the world, setting forth the true methods of arriving at truth by experiment and observation and the collation of facts, we do not need to read, because the substance of it may be found in better form in Mill's Logic. The
gpt
Essays, however, are world-famed for their condensed wit and wisdom on topics of never-dying interest, and stand among the very best books on the upper shelf. The
human
New Atlantis also should be read for breadth, with More's
gpt
Utopia;