still gives us a rare picture of the attitude of an intelligent
Elizabethan, of the generation which colonised America, toward the
past, the present, and the future worlds. Bacon's "Great Restoration"
is no longer a guide to scientific method; but his prefatory
statements as to his objects and hopes still offer a lofty
inspiration.

And so with the documents here drawn from the folios of Copernicus and
Calvin, with the criticism of Dryden and Wordsworth and Hugo, with
Dr. Johnson's Preface to his great Dictionary, with the astounding
manifesto of a new poetry from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"--each
of them has a value and significance independent now of the work which
it originally introduced, and each of them presents to us a man._




PREFACES AND EPILOGUES

BY WILLIAM CAXTON[A]




THE RECUYELL OF THE HISTORIES OF TROY

TITLE AND PROLOGUE TO BOOK I


Here beginneth the volume entitled and named the Recuyell of the