REFERENCE COPYRIGHT, 1893, By MACMILLAN AND CO. Norwood Press: J. S. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith. INTRODUCTION CHRONOLOGY is the backbone of history - of the history of literature as of any other. Perhaps no tool is more useful to a student of literature than a well-made table of wellselected titles and dates. Of late years no better implement of this kind has been devised than Mr. Frederick Ryland's "Chronological Outlines of English Literature," published in 1890. Mr. Ryland planned a work which should occupy toward literary history the position a date-book holds toward political history. In his Part I. he sought to bring "the annals of English literature into connection with general European literature and with history, so that a glance enables us to see the position that a given work occupies in the line of development"; and in his Part II. he gave an alphabetical list of authors with their principal works. Mr. Ryland hoped that Part I. would perform in some degree "the same kind of service for the student of literary history as a map does for the student of geography," while Part II. could be utilized in "studying literature from the biographical point of view." That Mr. Ryland has been successful in his hope is the testimony of all who have had occasion to use his invaluable manual; and the more it has been used, the more fully are its merits recognized. vii Nothing better showed Mr. Ryland's fitness for the exacting task he had undertaken than his omission of American authors from his main chronological table. As Mr. Ryland explained in his introduction, it was with considerable reluctance that he included occasional American books under foreign literature, declaring that "to have placed them with the English would have suggested a misleading conception of the two literatures." Of course, in the broadest sense of the term, English literature includes all that is written in the English language, whether in Great Britain and Ireland, or in the United States of America, or anywhere in the scattered British colonies. Strictly speaking, American literature to-day and Australian literature to-morrow are parts of English literature; and that part of English literature which is now being produced in Great Britain is, strictly speaking, British literature. With the extraordinary expansion of the Englishspeaking race, the stream of English literature has of necessity been divided, and while the current flowing in the original channel is the fullest and strongest even at the end of the nineteenth century, at least one of the other divisions is swelling year by year into closer rivalry. Very wisely Mr. Ryland paid little attention to these smaller streams after they left the main current, devoting himself wholly (in the nineteenth century) to the authors of Great Britain and Ireland. Thus he left the way open for any one who should desire to apply his method to the development of American literature. This is what Mr. Selden L. Whitcomb, Fellow in Literature of Columbia College, has attempted in the present volume. Mr. Whitcomb has modelled his book closely upon Mr. Ryland's, making only those modifications which were imposed upon him by the differences between the |