The Art of Letters

There is vision in some of the later verses in the poem, but, if we read it alongside of Mr. Yeats's, we get an impression of unsuccess of execution. Whether one can fairly use...

Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray's than all the poetical works of Southey? If voluminousness alone made a man a great writer, we should have t...

Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of countenance, quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of speech, I fancy, must have been an acquired mildness...

Cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius. It brought him one of the best...

Another argument which tells in favour of the theory that the best criticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable examples of critical folly have been denunciatio...

It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then--a popularizer who, for a new thing, was not also a vulgarizer--that Wilde seems to me to stand to his age. What, then, of Mr....

Poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as religion. In the great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a popular subject. The greatest poets, both of Greece...

It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole was merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He had a sense of greatness in literature,...

If Tennyson's reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. Perhaps there was never an English poet who loo...

The comedy of the Meredith family springs, of course, not from the fact that they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be tailors. Whether Meredith himself was more asha...

You were godfather to a good many of the chapters in this book when they first appeared in the _London Mercury_, the _New Statesman_, and the _British Review_. Others of the cha...

Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the point of _Troilus and Cressida_. He blunders with equal assiduity in regard to _Coriolanus_. He treats...

Cowper has the charm of littleness. His life and genius were on the miniature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for Atlas. He left several pictures of himself in his letter...

In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most interest in recent years--the Donne who experienced more variously than any other poet of his time "the quea...

It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we should constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his contemporaries. _Christabel_ and _Kubla Kahn_ w...

It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by wretchedness and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily corruptions was often tempted, by "a sickly incli...

Two of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Gosse's _Diversions of a Man of Letters_ are the essay on Catherine Trotter and that on "the message of the Wartons." Here he is on g...

The comparison of a review to a portrait fixes attention on one essential quality of a book-review. A reviewer should never forget his responsibility to his subject. He must all...

Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous. After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to read _Prometheus_ aga...

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; the power arises from within, like the colou...