Few of us adequately realize the immense Literature which has descended to us from our ancestors. Generation after generation has passed away; each of which has produced (in the order of its own thought, and with the tuition of its inherited or acquired experience] many a wise, bright or beautiful tiling: which having served its own brief day, has straightway passed away into utter forgetfulness, there to remain till Doomsday; unless some effort like the present, shall restore it to the knowledge and enjoyment of English-reading peoples.
This Collection is to gather, for the gratification of this and future ages, a vast amount of incomparable poesy and most stirring prose; which hardly any one would imagine to be in existence at all. Of many of the original impressions there survive, but one or two copies, and these often are most difficult of access; so that it is not too much to say of the following contents as a whole, that they have never hitherto come within the ken of any single English scholar.
The reader must be prepared often to find most crude and imperfect theories or beliefs, which later experience has exploded, mixed up with most important facts or allusions as to the times, manners or customs of the period then under illustration: leaving to us the obligation to reject the one, and to receive the other.
Many of the following books and tracts are the original materials out of which modern historians have culled the most graphic touches of their most brilliant pages. In fact, the Series is, in regard to much of its prose, a Study on a large scale of detached areas of English history; and stands in the same relation to the general national Story, as a selected Collection of Parish Maps would do to the Ordnance Survey of English land.
Our grateful thanks in regard to this First Volume are due to Henry Huth, Esquire, for the loan for reproduction herein of those two great rarities, The Great Frost at page 77, andThe Secrets of Angling at page 141.
