The volume that lies before us is significant of very much, That there should be demand in the popular reading world Histories of World Literature is a striking fying the publication of a series of
and gratifying comment on, the remark able change that has taken place amongst a very large section of the English reading public. There is now: to ho reckoned with, and catered for, a cultured class of reader who will not rest content with the answer fiction, pure and simple makes to his literary demands. A gener: tion ago such were reckoned among the dlite of the reading public; to-day—if in a minority they form a very considerable one.
For such a class Mr. Gosso is eminently qualified to write. Himself a critic of feat repute, his critical judgment and work With which we have every reason literary taste and energy have produced a to be more than satisfied. It could have been no easy matter, even for the talent of Mr. Gosse, to compress into the compass of four hundred pages a history of the literature of a nation, which should itself be literature. Mr. Gosso has graced his work,. The marvel of this book is that in 60 brief a space there is contained so much interesting and readable as well as valuable information. In it there is no dry page, certainly not " page we could spare, As ® mero bibliography it would have been invaluable, it is, however, far more than thi In the notices of even the lesser luminaries of the various periods, the author never descends to a mero cataloguing of names, and his facts, however trivial, are never unrelated.
Mr. Gosse has properly had in view the fact that it an evolution " of national litera-ready development, with which, in And though the genius of the monarchs of the pen—such as hiakespearo and Milton—rends the bonds of merely formal literary evolutional theory, yet, in his tracing of the growth of the "Library of the Nation," our author in no wise forgets the presence of this developing factor. Here the student of literature may observe both the influence of the writer's own age upon his work, and the influence of that work upon the age succeeding, and may yet note that progress a d not degeneration is the result of the whole. Asa popular and yet thoughtful exp-sition of the growth of-the genius of English literature this work is invaluable.
Torning to a consideration of the subject-matter of the book one is first of all struck with the concrete ample here given of the rapid -development, not only of the literature but also of the language of the English people. From Chaucer to Tennyson covers period.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.