authors of books about books, though Mr. Gosse is a poet and biographer as well, and Mr. Saintsbury, it is said, once dreamed of writing a history of wine.  One might say of Mr. Gosse that even in his critical work he writes largely as a poet and biographer, while Mr. Saintsbury writes of literature as though he were writing a history of wine.  Mr. Saintsbury seeks in literature, above all things, exhilarating qualities.  He can read almost anything and in any language, provided it is not non-intoxicating.  He has a good head, and it cannot be said that he ever allows an author to go to it.  But the authors whom he has collected in his wonderful cellar unquestionably make him merry.  In his books he always seems to be pressing on us “another glass of Jane Austen,” or “just a thimbleful of Pope,” or “a drop of ’42 Tennyson.”  No other critic of literature writes with the garrulous gusto of a boon-companion as Mr. Saintsbury does.  In our youth, when we demand style as well as gusto, we condemn him on account of his atrocious English.  As we grow older, we think of his English merely as a rather eccentric sort of coat, and we begin to recognize that geniality such as his is a part of critical genius.  True, he is not over-genial to new authors.  He regards them as he might 1916 claret.  Perhaps he is right.  Authors undoubtedly get mellower with age.  Even great poetry is, we are told, a little crude to the taste till it has stood for a few seasons.

Mr. Gosse is at once more grave and more deferential in his treatment of great authors.  One cannot imagine Mr. Saintsbury speaking in a hushed voice before Shakespeare himself.  One can almost hear him saying, “Hullo, Shakespeare!” To Mr. Gosse, however, literature is an almost sacred subject.  He glows in its presence.  He is more lyrical than Mr. Saintsbury, more imaginative and more eloquent.  His short history of English literature is a book that fills a young head with enthusiasm.  He writes as a servant of the great tradition.  He is a Whig, where Mr. Saintsbury is an heretical old Jacobite.  He is, however, saved from a professorial earnestness by his sharp talent for portraiture.  Mr. Gosse’s judgments may or may not last:  his portraits certainly will.  It is to be hoped that he will one day write his reminiscences.  Such a book would, we feel sure, be among the great books of portraiture in the history of English literature.  He has already set Patmore and Swinburne before us in comic reality, and who can forget the grotesque figure of Hans Andersen, sketched in a few lines though it is, in Two Visits to Denmark?  It may be replied that Mr. Gosse has already given us the best of his reminiscences in half a dozen books of essay and biography.  Even so, there were probably many things which it was not expedient to tell ten or twenty years ago, but which might well be related for the sake of truth and entertainment to-day.  Mr. Gosse in the past has usually told the truth about authors with the