Many of our older readers can remember the anticipation with which they looked for each successive volume of the late Dr. Young’s excellent series of old English prose-writers, and the delight with which they carried it home, fresh from the press and the bindery in its appropriate livery of evergreen.  To most of us it was our first introduction to the highest society of letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed scholar who gave us to share the conversation of such men as Latimer, More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Fuller, and Walton.  What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!  What a precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary literature!  How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in those silent crypts and Falernian amphorae of the Past!  No other writers speak to us with the authority of those whose ordinary speech was that of our translation of the Scriptures; to no modern is that frank unconsciousness possible which was natural to a period when yet reviews were not; and no later style breathes that country charm characteristic of days ere the metropolis drew all literary activity to itself, and the trampling feet of the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from the fresh privacies of language.  Truly, as compared with the present, these old voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the paved thoroughfares of thought.

Even the “Retrospective Review” continues to be good reading, in virtue of the antique aroma (for wine only acquires its bouquet by age) which pervades its pages.  Its sixteen volumes are so many tickets of admission to the vast and devious vaults of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through which we wander, tasting a thimbleful of rich Canary, honeyed Cyprus, or subacidulous Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our fancy chooses.  The years during which this Review was published were altogether the most fruitful in genuine appreciation of old English literature.  Books were prized for their imaginative, and not their antiquarian value, by young writers who sat at the feet of Lamb and Coleridge.  Rarities of style, of thought, of fancy were sought, rather than the barren scarcities of typography.  But another race of men seems to have sprung up, in whom the futile enthusiasm of the collector predominates, who substitute archaeologic perversity for aesthetic scholarship, and the worthless profusion of the curiosity-shop for the sifted exclusiveness of the cabinet of Art.  They forget, in their fanaticism for antiquity, that the dust of never so many centuries is impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that only good books absorb tone-mellowness from age, and that a baptismal register which proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) cannot make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous commonplace entertaining.