Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and Bookmen. By Clement
Shorter. (James Bowden.)—Mr. Shorter states that this is a "Jubilee volume," and we are, therefore, bound to regard the writer's end. It is obvious at a glance that any adequate criticism of Victorian literature is impossible within a hundred and ninety pages, and it is equally obvious from a reference to the copious index that the enormous mass of names represented leaves no space for a satisfactory judgment of the twenty or thirty men who stand out most prominently in the- period. Mr. Shorter holds that George Borrow is "one of our greatest men of letters," that Emily Bronte's verse "is perhapa the greatest ever written by a woman," that readers of poetry have no time now for the " Excursion " and the "Prelude," and that "the great epoch of English fiction ended with Sir Walter Scott." We differ as to Wordsworth, but agree wholly as to Emily Brontë, and partially as to Borrow and Scott Borrow was a great writer, though not one of the greatest, and Scott, though our greatest novelist, was succeeded by Dickens and Thackeray.
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