Part 24

"_As you read of the fair knights and the foul knights--for Froissart tells of both--it cannot but occur to you that somehow it seems harder to be a good knight now-a-days than it was then.... Nevertheless the same qualities which made a manful fighter then, make one now. To speak the very truth, to perform a promise to the utmost, to reverence all women, to maintain right and honesty, to help the weak; to treat high and low with courtesy, to be constant to one love, to be fair to a bitter foe, to despise luxury, to pursue simplicity, modesty and gentleness in heart and bearing, this was in the oath of the young knight who took the stroke upon him in the fourteenth century, and this is still the way to win love and glory in the nineteenth._"--EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE.

CRITICAL NOTICES.

"There is no reason why Sir John Froissart should not become as well known to young readers as Robinson Crusoe himself."--_Literary World._

"Though Mr. Lanier calls his edition of Froissart a book for boys, it is a book for men as well, and many there be of the latter who will enjoy its pages."--_N. Y. Eve. Mail._

"We greet this book with positive enthusiasm, feeling that the presentation of Froissart in a shape so tempting to youth is a particularly worthy task, particularly well done."--_N. Y. Eve. Post._

"The book is romantic, poetical, and full of the real adventure which is so much more wholesome, than the sham which fills so much of the stimulating juvenile literature of the day."--_Detroit Free Press._

"That boy will be lucky who gets Mr. Sidney Lanier's 'Boy's Froissart' for a Christmas present this year. There is no better and healthier reading for boys than 'Fine Sir John;' and this volume is so handsome, so well printed, and so well illustrated that it is a pleasure to look it over."--_Nation._

"Mr. Sidney Lanier, in editing a boy's version of Froissart, has not only opened to them a world of romantic and poetic legend of the chivalric and heroic sort, but he has given them something which ennobles and does not poison the mind. Old Froissart was a gentleman every inch; he hated the base, the cowardly, the paltry; he loved the knightly, the heroic, the gentle, and this spirit breathes through all his chronicles. There is a genuineness, too, about his writings that gives them a literary value."--_Baltimore Gazette._

"In his work of editing the famous knightly chronicle that Sir Walter Scott declared inspired him with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself, Mr. Lanier has shown, naturally, a warm appreciativeness and also a nice power of discrimination. He has culled the choicest of the chronicles, the most romantic, and at the same time most complete, and has digested them into an orderly compact volume, upon which the publishers have lavished fine paper, presswork and binding, and that is illustrated by a number of cuts."--_Philadelphia Times._

[**asterism] _For sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, post-paid, upon receipt of price, by_

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NOS. 743 AND 745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

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_The Boy's King Arthur._

Being Sir THOMAS MALORY'S History of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Edited, with an Introduction, by SIDNEY LANIER.

With 12 Illustrations by ALFRED KAPPES.

One vol., 8vo, extra cloth,--$3.00.

Two famous books--The History of King Arthur, and the inexhaustible Chronicles of Froissart--have furnished nearly all those stories of chivalry and knightly adventure that are scattered through all literatures, and that have been the favorite reading of boyhood for hundreds of years. Boys of the last few generations, however,--even though the separate stories in some form will never die out,--have lost sight of the two great sources themselves, which were in danger of becoming utterly hidden under cumbrous texts and labored commentary.

Last year Mr. Sidney Lanier opened one of these sources again by the publication of his _Boy's Froissart_. He has now performed the same office for the noble old English of Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; and under the title of _The Boy's King Arthur_, has given the _Froissart_ a companion, which perhaps even surpasses it. However familiar the Arthurian heroes may be to him, as mere names encountered in poetry and scattered legends, not one boy in ten thousand will be prepared for the endless fascination of the great stories in their original shape, and vigor of language. He will have something of the feeling with which, at their first writing, as Mr. Lanier says in his preface "the fascinated world read of Sir Lancelot du Lake, of Queen Guenever, of Sir Tristram, of Queen Isolde, of Merlin, of Sir Gawaine, of the Lady of the Lake, of Sir Galahad, and of the wonderful search for the Holy Cup, called the 'Saint Graal.'"

The _Boy's King Arthur_, like the _Froissart_, will have Mr. Alfred Kappes's vigorous and admirable illustrations; and the subject here has given him, if possible, even greater opportunity to embody the spirit of the knightly stories which he has caught so thoroughly.

[**asterism]_The above book for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, upon receipt of price, by_

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, PUBLISHERS, 743 AND 745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

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_THE Science of English Verse._

BY SIDNEY LANIER.

1 vol., crown 8vo.--$2.00.

This work marks a distinctly new phase in the study of English literature--a study to which it is certainly the most noteworthy American contribution made in many years. It embodies opinions thoughtfully held, and the results of a well-known thorough scholarship; and, in spite of its striking originality, it is not in any sense the mere putting forth of a theory.

Mr. Lanier combats vigorously the false methods which have become traditional in English prosody, and exposes them in a study of our older poetry which, with all the peculiar charm of Mr. Lanier's clear style, is not less attractive to the general reader than valuable for its results. But the most striking and interesting portion of the book to every student of letters is the author's presentation of his own suggestions for a truer method; his treatment of verse almost entirely as analogous with music--and this not figuratively, but as really governed by the same laws, little modified. His forcible and very skillful use of the most modern investigations in acoustics in supporting this position, makes the book not only a contribution to literature, but, in the best sense, to physical science; and it is in this union of elements that the work shows an altogether new direction of thought.

[**asterism] _This book is for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent post-paid upon receipt of price, by_

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, PUBLISHERS, 743 AND 745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

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