Letters of Literary Men in the Nineteenth Century. Arranged and
Edited by Frank Arthur Mumby. (G. Routledge and Sons. 23: 6d. net.)—These letters begin with Frances Burney and end with Robert Buchanan. Mr. Mumby divides his collection into four parts, to which he gives the names of " The Age of Wordsworth add Scott," "The Age of Byron," "The Early Victorian Age," "The Age of Tennyson." These divisions cannot but seem some- times arbitrary. Possibly it might have been better to put III. and IV. into one. To put Browning, Edward FitzGerald, and Thomas Carlyle into one part and Tennyson into another is scarcely reasonable. Even as a matter of chronology it is wrong, foi Tennyson was three years older than Browning, and; we should say, belongs, on the whole, to an earlier school of thought. But Mr. Mumby has done his work well. One or two letters could have been spared,—that absurd one, for instance, in which William Hazlitt writes to his eon, then a boy of ten, on "Women and Art," beginning with the counsel "If ever you marry, I would wish you to marry the woman you like." This is foolish enough, but it is nothing to what follows, which we do not care to quote.
Previous page
