Edward Dowden was a poet, scholar, and critic whose work helped to shape the artistic and intellectual life of his time. His position as a critic was well defined by Maurice Alfred Gerothwohl: "But if Dowden was not so great a critic as a [Algernon Charles] Swinburne or a [George] Meredith; if he were less brilliant than a Matthew Arnold, he was undoubtedly the best, the finest English critic of his day, and the most representative." Moreover, though Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, for well over forty years, his interests were by no means confined to English and included French, German, Italian, and American thought and literature. Indeed, William Kirkpatrick Magee asserted that "Dowden's mind was probably the first point touched by anything new in the world of ideas outside Ireland." As a critic, poet, and editor he showed himself to be sensitive to the...