American Literature, 1607 - 1885. By Charles F. Richardson. Vol. II. "American
Poetry and Fiction." (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)— This second volume completes Mr. Richardson's valuable summary of American literature. As to poetry, Mr. Richardson thinks that "only one true poem " was produced in America before 1800. This was by Philip Frenean (1752-1832), and bore the title of "The House of Night : a Vision." But no specimen is given sufficient to enable us to judge of its merits. It is not too much to say that no verse writer before W. C. Bryant is worth reading except as a curiosity. After this there is no lack of material. Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Russell Lowell, 0. W. Holmes, Edgar Poe, are names which are well known on both sides of the Atlantic. None of them can be put in the first class of the world's poets, and not all in the second (we are supposing the numbers of the two classes to be somewhat narrowly limited). But they form an aggregate of poetical power of which the country may be proud. Mr. Richardson makes, we think, a just estimate of them, and he treats at some length the question whether Walt Whitman should be ranked with them. With Whitman the review of American poets concludes, a scarcely sufficient space being left for fiction. A chapter is allotted to Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne, another to "The Lesser Novelists," and yet a third to "Later Movements in American Fiction." Mr. Richardson is not un- duly favourable to his own contemporaries. Yet our impression is that the average merit of present-day American fiction is high, higher certainly than is to be found on this side of the water. On the whole, we can recommend Mr. Richardson's volumes as containing a substantially just and vigorously ex- pressed criticism. We could wish that he would banish from his style some oddities that we shall venture to call vulgarisms. To say that a book " samples " the authors from whom extracts are made, is simply detestable. And what is meant by " a trig little epic "? Mr. Richardson speaks of blank verse as consisting of "unrhymed pentameters." But " pentameter " is a word appro- priated to a special verse of a quite different kind, the complement, so to speak, of the hexameter in the elegiac couplet, a verse which has been used with some success in English poetry.
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