The Connecticut Wits, and Other Essays

Of all the wooden poetry of these Connecticut bards, David Humphreys’s seems to me the woodenest,—big patriotic verse essays on the model of the “Essay on Man”; “Address to the...

Accordingly, many pages are here omitted which are to be found in his published works, but a great wealth of matter remains—chips from his workshop—which will be new to the read...

Of course in all comic art there is a touch of caricature, i.e., of exaggeration. The Rev. Charles Honeyman in “The Newcomes,” e.g., has been denounced as a caricature. But comp...

I believe that the only contemporaries who rivaled him in popularity were Herbert and Cleveland, for Waller did not come to his own until after Cowley’s death. Herbert’s “Temple...

Perhaps, then, no hard and fast line can be drawn between an acting drama and a closet play. It is largely a matter of contemporary taste. “Cato,” we know, made a prodigious hit...

In some aspects and relations, harsh and unlovely, egotistical and stubborn, the total impression of Milton’s personality is singularly imposing. His virtues were manly virtues....

In this play and in “The Crusaders,” social satire is successfully essayed at the expense of prevailing fads, such as fashionable philanthropy, slumming parties, neighborhood gu...

And Ellery Channing, who had in him brave, translunary things, as Hawthorne testifies no less than Emerson; as his own poems do partly testify—those poems which were so savagely...

To these farces succeeded pieces in which social satire, sentimental comedy, and the comedy of character were mixed in varying proportions: “Sweet Lavender,” “The Princess and t...

Sheridan has often been called the English Beaumarchais. The comedies of Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro” were precisely contemporaneous with S...

It is not without astonishment that one finds Emerson writing, “To this antique heroism Milton added the genius of the Christian sanctity . . . laying its chief stress on humili...

Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of Engl...

1. The Connecticut Wits 2. The Singer of the Old Swimmin’ Hole 3. Emerson’s Journals 4. The Art of Letter Writing 5. Thackeray’s Centenary 6. Retrospects and Prospects of the En...

The English drama was self-originated and self-developed, like the Spanish, but unlike the classical stages of Italy and France. Coming down from the old scriptural and allegori...