dependencies. Thus Thackeray was born in Calcutta, and SO was Charles Buller, the philosophical Radical; Bombay was the birthplace not merely of Rudyard Kipling, most imperialist of writers, but of such a representative Anglican dignitary as the Dean of Canterbury. Laurence Oliphant, a cosmopolitan rolling-stone, yet British to the backbone, saw the light at Capetown. There is inevitably in our home literature much that marks the world-colonising nation, the empirebuilding race.

Mankind may not be growing much holier or happier, but the stream of tendency makes for greater kindliness and the breaking down of boundaries; kindliness which begins at home inevitably extends by degrees to all the outlying kin in their several

places and relations; and at the close of the nineteenth century, in the last years of Victoria's reign, the bands of kindness have been drawn sensibly closer between the island people and their colonies, between the United Kingdom and the United States. To the youth of the English kin this work is once more and in a new shape offered as a help in seeking out and laying to heart the wisdom and the wit of our famous men of old and the fathers that begat us, in the confidence that allegiance to the highest traditions of our literature will increasingly obliterate local and temporary jealousies; and in the hope that many a saying herein recorded may make generations to come proud to be of the English name, and stir in them the thrill that tightens even the grasp of bloodbrotherhood.

D. P.