The uses of literature are manifold.  Its study gives wholesome food to the mind, making it strong and systematic.  It cultivates and delights the imagination and the taste of men.  It refines society by elevating the thoughts and aspirations above what is sensual and sordid, and by checking the grosser passions; it makes up, in part, that “multiplication of agreeable consciousness” which Dr. Johnson calls happiness.  Its adaptations in religion, in statesmanship, in legislative and judicial inquiry, are productive of noble and beneficent results.  History shows us, that while it has given to the individual man, in all ages, contemplative habits, and high moral tone, it has thus also been a powerful instrument in producing the brilliant civilization of mighty empires.

A TEACHER OF HISTORY.—­But apart from these its subjective benefits, it has its highest and most practical utility as a TEACHER OF HISTORY.  Ballads, more powerful than laws, shouted forth from a nation’s heart, have been in part the achievers, and afterward the victorious hymns, of its new-born freedom, and have been also used in after ages to reinspire the people with the spirit of their ancestors.  Immortal epics not only present magnificent displays of heroism for imitation, but, like the Iliad and Odyssey, still teach the theogony, national policy, and social history of a people, after the Bema has long been silent, the temples in ruin, and the groves prostrate under the axe of repeated conquests.

Satires have at once exhibited and scourged social faults and national follies, and remained to after times as most essential materials for history.

Indeed, it was a quaint but just assertion of Hare, in his “Guesses at Truth,” that in Greek history there is nothing truer than Herodotus except Homer.

ITALY AND FRANCE.—­Passing by the classic periods, which afford abundant illustration of the position, it would be easy to exhibit the clear and direct historic teachings in purely literary works, by a reference to the literature of Italy and France.  The history of the age of the Guelphs and Ghibellines is clearly revealed in the vision of Dante:  the times of Louis XIV. are amply illustrated by the pulpit of Massillon, Bourdaloue, and Bridaine, and by the drama of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere.

ENGLISH LITERATURE THE BEST ILLUSTRATION.—­But in seeking for an illustration of the position that literature is eminently a teacher and interpreter of history, we are fortunate in finding none more striking than that presented by English literature itself.  All the great events of English history find complete correspondent delineation in English literature, so that, were the purely historical record lost, we should have in the works of poetry, fiction, and the drama, correct portraitures of the character, habits, manners and customs, political sentiments, and modes and forms of religious belief among the English people; in a word, the philosophy of English history.