Excerpt from The Universal Anthology, Vol. 2: A Collection of the Best Literature, Ancient, Medieval and Modern, With Biographical and Explanatory Notes IT is seldom fully appreciated, what a very large share of the world's literature is history of some sort. The primitive savage is probably the only kind of man who takes no interest in it except it be that the memory of the dead is often carefully obliterated by him, and the names, or even words suggesting the names, of his fathers, tabooed from his speech. But as soon as a spark of civilisation illumines this primitive darkness, men begin to take an interest 111 other men, not only beyond their own immediate surroundings, but beyond the limits of their own generation. Interest in the past and provision for the future are perhaps the essential mental differences between the civilised man and the savage. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.