BOOKS.

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.* To write a good history of a great literature is a privilege granted to few. Usually such a book is the collective work of many authors. Done by one man, however high his qualifi- cations, it is apt to be in large part formal and mechanical. Universal sympathies are not given to mankind, and the author must content himself too often with repeating the stereotyped formulas of criticism. It is a laborious task from which the boldest well might shrink, for the sincerest lover of letters will find his enthusiasm flag as he travels through the more arid stretches of our literature. Andrew Lang was one of the most industrious of men, and it is significant of his courage that he should have embarked on this undertaking at the end of a laborious life which had been largely devoted to writing about books. "That sins of commission as well as of omission will be discovered," be says in the Preface, "the author cannot doubt, for through much reading and writing they that look out of window are darkened and errors come." It would be easy enough to find errors, but he must be a pedant indeed who would look for them. For the book is extraordinarily good; by far the freshest, sanest, wisest guide to the whole range of English letters which has yet appeared. The vitality of appreciation never ebbs ; every page is characteristic of a man who always kept the youth of the heart. To lovers of that chivalrous soul the book will seem in a peculiar degree his last testament. We find all those loyaltlea whieh charmed us in his other work— the Border, Homer, Jeanne d'Are, Mary of Scots, and Prince Charlie. The dates which run in his head are the '15 and the '45. Scott is his touchstone, his ideal of excellence in mind and character, and he is not deterred by any anwmic scruples from revealing his robust preferences. He touched life at many points, and he was catholic in his taste for books.

But be never loses his sense of values. He is very conscious of the "line which separates poets who may be read from poets who must be written about."

His criticism is always "of the centre." He is scrupulously fair, recognizing even a merit which he does not love; but few real merits are alien to his affections. His strong common sense makes him revolt from "chatter about Harriet" and fantastic and esoteric speculations. He is disposed to judge

great work, as it should be judged, at its face value. The Sonnets, he says, are not to be "dimmed by mists of con-

jecture, or nonsense about Shakespeare as a sensual syco- phantic snob, mad with jealousy and foiled desire." His vast knowledge not only widens the sphere of his appreciation, as compared with most writers, but furnishes him with analogies and standards of value most useful in such a work. For in a good literary history criticism should be comparative. It is much more important for the reader to know that one work resembles another than to be told that it fulfils this or that condition of some mstbetic canon on which no two people are agreed. Again, he had always a sense of the reality behind books. When he mentions an epic or a novel he tells its story, for he was as much interested in what a man had to say as in how he said it. He can never forget, too, that living, breathing human beings produced the work, and he tells us something of them. He is as sensitive to a good life as to a good book, and he has drawn many de- lightful portraits. When he speaks of Scott he tells us that as he writes his eyes are dim, "so potent is the spell of that rich, kind genius, of that noble character, over the hearts of those who love and honour the great and good Sir Walter."

Collier—to take an instance of a one-volume history of litera- ture—was fond of portraying his authors, but Collier had an absurd dithyrambic style which muddles the picture. Lang is always clean-cut, sympathetic, and well-balanced. Take, for example, the admirable picture of ,Chaucer, or that of the author of Piers Plowman : the kindly sketches of Bunyan, and Izaak Walton, and Lowell: the slightly malicious vignette of Young : or the delightful pages on Steele :—

" His heart was in the right place. He honoured women and pure affection, and temperance, and the wedded state. But his many brief notes to his second wife, . . . written at all manner of places and at all sorts of hours, prove that poor Prue had often • History of Bnglish Literature from Browning to Swinburat. By Andrew Lang. London : Longmans and Co. [6..] to dine alone. Business detained her Richard ; he came home with the milk, and had a terrible headache next day. . . . He adored children ; his tears were as ready and heroic as the team of Homer's warriors. But when he yielded to the temptations of the bottle and of extravagance, his wife and children bad to suffer just as much as if Richard, in place of being a Christian hero, had been no better than the wicked."

It is hard to select where the entertainment is so good. Lang is naturally at his best in writing of the old ballad- makers and of the whole literature of the Grail. Of the

Elizabethan dramatists, who have been grossly overpraised lately, he says that "all of the treasures of his predecessors are not equivalent, or nearly equivalent, to the small change of Shakespeare's genius," but he gives us an admirable study of Marlowe. The same common sense is shown in his treatment of the Caroline poets, whose occasional beauties make us forget the dreary wastes in which they are oases. He is excellent on Addison, who left the world better than he found it, "not by 'lashing the vices of the age,' but by sensibly lowering the tyranny of the fashion which insisted on the duty of being vicious." He writes aptly of Swift's "bleak lucidity of soul," and he says of Smollett that "his heroines are regarded by his heroes rather as luxuries than as ladies." As we should expect, be is at home with Fielding and Samuel Johnson, with Scott and Mockery, and his estimate of Jane Austen is one of the best we have read.

But he is no less good on Keats, Poe, Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne, and he has an aoute study of Nathaniel Haw- thorne. Naturally, with his historical views, he falls foul of Macaulay and Froude as historians, though be does ample justice to the merit of their style, but he rescues Hallam from neglect. He says truly of Carlyle that be was "first of all a Scottish humourist " and notes his " thrawnness." "The peasant stoic felt the pain of the pea beneath a heap of mattresses as keenly as the delicate princess of the fairy tale."

If we had to take one instance of the sane and central quality of his criticism we should select the section on Dickens, which in the space of four pages seems to us to speak the exact truth about one who, as a rule, is either extravagantly lauded or- extravagantly decried.

Even in his most hurried journalism Lang never lost his curious felicity of style. It might be said of him, as Johnson said of Goldsmith, "nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit." Much of this charm is due. to his ever-present sense of humour. We see it in his deft

résumé of a story, as when be tells the plot of Vanbrugh's The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger. Sometimes it is a sense of comic analogies : "the nature of Burke's financial resources

. . . is as mysterious as the address of his fellow-countryman,

The Mulligan, in Thackeray's book." Often it is a cold douche of fact in connexion with some rhapsody. "In honour of a daughter of Drury who died young, Donne had written two extraordinary poems. . . . There seemed reason to fear that Donne would celebrate Miss Drury, whom he had never seen,

once a year, while his life endured." Or this on Coleridgea unfinished poem on Jeanne d'Arc : "He represented her as seeing her Saints first when of the age of twenty, to which she never attained. . . . The Voices, in Coleridge, spoke to Jeanne about the Pacific Ocean, the Protoplast, Leviathan, and kindred matters, not much in her way." Again, "One glorious passage (in Ruskin) gives a great Turneresque picture

of a scene viewed from a certain bridge over Ettrick, where„,in fact, to mortal eyes, no such prospect is visible." But the quality is most attractive in his notes on those people of fiction whom all the world remembers—easy, well-bred gossip, like the best kind of talk. The book is full of such passages, and this on The Neweames may serve as a sample of the rest. " Every- one wept over the good Colonel, loathed the Campaigner, delighted in Fred Bayham, wished to beat Barnes Newcome on the nose,' was afraid of Lady Kew ; sighed with Clive, was more or less in love with Ethel, and was anxious, vainly anxious, to see no more of Laura Pendennis : an angel,.

perhaps, but a recording angel."