Two of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Gosse’s Diversions of a Man of Letters are the essay on Catherine Trotter and that on “the message of the Wartons.”  Here he is on ground on which there is no leader-writer to take him by the hand and guide him into saying “the right thing.”  He writes as a disinterested scholar and an entertainer.  He forgets the war and is amused.  How many readers are there in England who know that Catherine Trotter “published in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox,” and that “she was then fourteen years of age”?  How many know even that she wrote a blank-verse tragedy in five acts, called Agnes de Cestro, and had it produced at Drury Lane at the age of sixteen?  At the age of nineteen she was the friend of Congreve, and was addressed by Farquhar as “one of the fairest of her sex and the best judge.”  By the age of twenty-five, however, she had apparently written herself out, so far as the stage was concerned, and after her tragedy, The Revolution in Sweden, the theatre knows her no more.  Though described as “the Sappho of Scotland” by the Queen of Prussia, and by the Duke of Marlborough as “the wisest virgin I ever knew,” her fame did not last even as long as her life.  She married a clergyman, wrote on philosophy and religion, and lived till seventy.  Her later writings, according to Mr. Gosse, “are so dull that merely to think of them brings tears into one’s eyes.”  Her husband, who was a bit of a Jacobite, lost his money on account of his opinions, even though—­“a perfect gentleman at heart—­’he always prayed for the King and Royal Family by name.’” “Meanwhile,” writes Mr. Gosse, “to uplift his spirits in this dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print.  He reminds us of Dr. Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine.”  Altogether the essay on Catherine Trotter is an admirable example of Mr. Gosse in a playful mood.

The study of Joseph and Thomas Warton as “two pioneers of romanticism” is more serious in purpose, and is a scholarly attempt to discover the first symptoms of romanticism in eighteenth-century literature.  Mr. Gosse finds in The Enthusiast, written by Joseph Warton at the age of eighteen, “the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century.”  He does not pretend that it is a good poem, but “here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria.”  It is in Joseph Warton, according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with “the individualist attitude to nature.”  Readers of Horace Walpole’s letters, however, will remember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature.  But these were not published for many years afterwards.