One of the most representative of the genteel academic critics of the late nineteenth century was Henry Augustin Beers, who taught English literature at Yale for over forty years. Beers was a versatile writer of fiction, poetry, and essays as well as the author of several popular introductory surveys of English and American literature and a detailed two-volume history of English romanticism. His intimate knowledge of all kinds of literature was legendary among Yale students, to whom he often seemed a shy and retiring figure. His chief contribution was as a popularizer, but a popularizer who wrote with a thorough knowledge and love of his material.

Beers was from a Connecticut family which traced its origins in America back to the seventeenth centry. He was very much rooted in the soil of Connecticut. Henry S. Canby, who was one of Beers's students at the turn of the century...