been the dependence of authors of every age even back to the times of the worthy robert of who wrote his history in of saxon even now many talk of s well of pure english as if the language ever sprang from a well or fountain head and was not rather a mere of various tongues perpetually subject to changes and it is this which has made english literature so extremely and the reputation built upon it so fleeting unless thought can be committed to something more permanent and than such a medium even thought must share the fate of every thing else and fall into decay this should serve as a check upon the vanity and exultation of the ho in his chronicle afterwards also by of and of john in the time of richard the second and after them of john and john of our said was brought to an excellent notwithstanding that it never came unto the type of perfection until the time of queen elizabeth wherein john bishop of john fox and learned and excellent writers have fully accomplished the of the same to their great praise and immortal p the most popular writer he finds the language in which he has embarked his fame gradually and subject to the of time and the caprice of fashion he looks back and the early authors of his country once the of their day by modern writers a few short ages have covered them with obscurity and their merits can only be by the quaint taste of the and such he be the fate of his own work which however it may be admired in its day and held up as a model of purity will in the course of years grow and until it should become almost as unintelligible in its native land as an egyptian or one of those said to exist in the deserts of i declare added i with some emotion when i contemplate a modern library filled with new works in all the bravery of rich and binding i feel disposed to sit down and weep like die good when he surveyed his army out in all the splendour of military array and reflected that in one hundred years not one of them would be in existence ah said the little with a heavy sigh i see how it is these modern have all the good old authors i suppose is read now a days but sir philip s of literature s stately plays and mirror for or the fine spun of the john there you are again mistaken said i the writers whom you suppose in because they happened to be so when you were last in circulation have long since had their day sir philip s the immortality of which was so fondly predicted by his admirers and which in truth is full of noble thoughts delicate images and graceful turns of language is now scarcely ever mentioned has into obscurity and even though his writings were once the delight of a court and apparently by a proverb is now scarcely known even by name a whole crowd of authors who wrote and at the time have likewise gone down with all their writings and their wave after wave of succeeding literature has rolled over them until they are buried so deep that it is only now and then that some industrious after fragments of an live ever the simple image of his gentle and the golden pillar of his noble courage and ever unto the world that thy writer was the secretary of eloquence the breath of the the honey bee of the flowers of and the of and intellectual virtues the of in the field the tongue of in the chamber the of practise in and the of in print s pierce s the brings up a specimen for the gratification off the curious for my part i continued i consider this of language a wise precaution of providence for the benefit of the world at large and of authors in particular to reason from � we daily behold the varied and beautiful tribes of vegetables springing up flourishing the fields for a short time and then fading into dust to make way for their were not this the case the of nature would be a grievance instead of a blessing the earth would groan rank and excessive vegetation and its surface become a tangled wilderness in like manner the works of genius and learning decline and make way for subsequent productions language gradually and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time otherwise the powers of genius would the world a d the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless of literature formerly there were some on this excessive works had to be by hand which was a slow and laborious operation they were written either on which was expensive so that one work was often to make way another or on which was fragile and extremely was a limited and of literature � craft and pursued chiefly by in the leisure and solitude of their the of was slow and costly and confined almost entirely to to these circumstances it may in some measure be owing that we have not been by the intellect of antiquity that the fountains of thought have not been broken up and modern genius drowned in the but the inventions of paper and the press have put an end to all these they have made every one a writer and enabled every mind to pour itself into print and itself over the whole intellectual world the consequences are alarming the stream of literature has into a torrent � into a river � expanded into a sea a few centuries since five or six hundred constituted a great library but what would you say to such as actually exist containing three and four hundred thousand volumes 