writing his Diary until he died in 1825.  His MSS. passed into the hands of John Mitford, who amused the readers of The Gentleman’s Magazine with fragments of them for several years.  Green has had many admirers in the past, amongst whom Edward FitzGerald was not the least distinguished.  But he was always something of a local worthy, author of one anonymous book, and of late he has been little mentioned outside the confines of Suffolk.

It would be difficult to find an example more striking than the Diary of a Lover of Literature of exclusive absorption in the world of books.  It opens in a gloomy year for British politics, but there is found no allusion to current events.  There is a victory off Cape St. Vincent in February, 1797, but Green is attacking Bentley’s annotations on Horace.  Bonaparte and his army are buried in the sands of Egypt; our Diarist takes occasion to be buried in Shaftesbury’s Enquiry Concerning Virtue.  Europe rings with Hohenlinden, but the news does not reach Mr. Thomas Green, nor disturb him in his perusal of Soame Jenyns’ View of Christianity.  The fragment of the Diary here preserved runs from September 1796 to June 1800.  No one would guess, from any word between cover and cover, that these were not halcyon years, an epoch of complete European tranquillity.  War upon war might wake the echoes, but the river ran softly by the Ipswich garden of this gentle enthusiast, and not a murmur reached him through his lilacs and laburnums.

I have said that this book is one of the latest expressions of unadulterated eighteenth-century sentiment.  For form’s sake, the Diarist mentions now and again, very superficially, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton; but in reality, the garden of his study is bounded by a thick hedge behind the statue of Dryden.  The classics of Greece and Rome, and the limpid reasonable writers of England from the Restoration downwards, these are enough for him.  Writing in 1800 he has no suspicion of a new age preparing.  We read these stately pages, and we rub our eyes.  Can it be that when all this was written, Wordsworth and Coleridge had issued Lyrical Ballads, and Keats himself was in the world?  Almost the only touch which shows consciousness of a suspicion that romantic literature existed, is a reference to the rival translations of Burger’s Lenore in 1797.  Sir Walter Scott, as we know, was one of the anonymous translators; it was, however, in all probability not his, but Taylor’s, that Green mentions with special approbation.

In one hundred years a mighty change has come over the tastes and fashions of literary life.  When The Diary of a Lover of Literature was written, Dr. Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop of Worcester, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on the tradition of his yet more formidable master Warburton.  As people nowadays discuss Verlaine and Ibsen, so they argued in those days about Godwin and Horne Tooke,