(2) The Chimneypiece of Bruges and Other Poems.  By Constance E. Dixon.  (Elliot Stock.)

(3) Oliver Cromwell and Other Poems.  By Dawson Burns, D.D. (Partridge and Co.)

(4) The Circle of Saints.  By K. E. V. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)

(5) Poems.  By Edward Foskett. (Kegan Paul.)

(6) The Pilgrimage of Memory.  By John Thomas Barker. (Simpkin, Marshall and Co.)

(7) Errata.  By G. Gladstone Turner. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(8) Nivalis.  By J. M. W. Schwartz. (Kegan Paul.)

GREAT WRITERS BY LITTLE MEN

(Pall Mall Gazette, March 28, 1887.)

In an introductory note prefixed to the initial volume of ’Great Writers,’ a series of literary monographs now being issued by Mr. Walter Scott, the publisher himself comes forward in the kindest manner possible to give his authors the requisite ‘puff preliminary,’ and ventures to express the modest opinion that such original and valuable works ’have never before been produced in any part of the world at a price so low as a shilling a volume.’  Far be it from us to make any heartless allusion to the fact that Shakespeare’s Sonnets were brought out at fivepence, or that for fourpence-halfpenny one could have bought a Martial in ancient Rome.  Every man, a cynical American tells us, has the right to beat a drum before his booth.  Still, we must acknowledge that Mr. Walter Scott would have been much better employed in correcting some of the more obvious errors that appear in his series.  When, for instance, we come across such a phrase as ’the brotherly liberality of the brothers Wedgewood,’ the awkwardness of the expression is hardly atoned for by the fact that the name of the great potter is misspelt; Longfellow is so essentially poor in rhymes that it is unfair to rob him even of one, and the misquotation on page 77 is absolutely unkind; the joke Coleridge himself made upon the subject should have been sufficient to remind any one that ‘Comberbach’ (sic) was not the name under which he enlisted, and no real beauty is added to the first line of his pathetic Work Without Hope by printing ‘lare’ (sic) instead of ‘lair.’  The truth is that all premature panegyrics bring their own punishment upon themselves and, in the present case, though the series has only just entered upon existence, already a great deal of the work done is careless, disappointing, unequal and tedious.

Mr. Eric Robertson’s Longfellow is a most depressing book.  No one survives being over-estimated, nor is there any surer way of destroying an author’s reputation than to glorify him without judgment and to praise him without tact.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the first true men of letters America produced, and as such deserves a high place in any history of American civilisation.  To a land out of breath in its greed for gain he showed the example of a life devoted entirely to the study