PERSONAL FORCES IN LITERATURE.
"are not intended as contributions to critical literature they are concerned rather with the 'personal equation' of the writers discussed than with the purely literary aspects of their work." It is easy to imagine that a book written on these lines in a sympathetic spirit by a well-informed person may be highly interesting. Such, indeed, is Mr. Rickett's book. Each paper has its own heading, illustrated with one or more examples. First comes the "Preacher," and here the examples, which could not be better chosen, are J. H. Newman and James Martineau. Both men are pictured for us, and in both cases the personality and the literary work are combined into a quite admirable temperamentum. Of the "Scientist" Huxley is the sole representative; the "Poet" we see in Wordsworth, Keats, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti ; Dickens stands, again singly, for the "Novelist"; and the "Vagabond," a novel and suggestive designation, finds his concrete examples in William Hazlitt and
De Quincey. The papers were originally lectures, and perhaps we now and then see something that has a somewhat strong flavour of the platform. As a whole, however, they are a good piece of work.
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