i. Works whose sole importance is that they form a link in the chain
of development. For example, nearly all the productions of authors
between Chaucer and the beginning of the Elizabethan period, such as
Gower, Hoccleve, and Skelton, whose works, for sufficient reason, are
read only by professors and students who mean to be professors.

ii. Works not originally written in English, such as the works of
that very great philosopher Roger Bacon, of whom this isle ought to be
prouder than it is. To this rule, however, I have been constrained
to make a few exceptions. Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_ was written
in Latin, but one does not easily conceive a library to be complete
without it. And could one exclude Sir Isaac Newton's _Principia_, the
masterpiece of the greatest physicist that the world has ever
seen? The law of gravity ought to have, and does have, a powerful
sentimental interest for us.

iii. Translations from foreign literature into English.


Here, then, are the lists for the first period:


PROSE WRITERS £ s. d.

Bede, _Ecclesiastical History_: Temple
Classics. 0 1 6

Sir Thomas Malory, _Morte d'Arthur_:
Everyman's Library (4 vols.) 0 4 0