studied in contrast to its crude and faint expression in the Eschylean drama. In a forthcoming revised edition the new sub-title will clearly indicate this purpose, while a great number of errors will be corrected. The publication of these lectures was urged in 1882 by friends who had listened to them. At the time, and for long afterwards, I was quite disabled and could exercise no discretion, and I followed the counsel of one who, after a too cursory examination, believed that they would need only careful proof reading.' My inexperience kept me from seeing that some editing was indispensable with an unrevised first draught of a work that had been shaped and penned in the feebleness of mortal illness; so it was committed to the generous care of a friend, without giving him liberty to lay any doubtful question before me during a long seclusion under rest 'treatment.' A multitude of mistakes ensued; some

from the copyist's unfamiliarity with the handwriting and misunderstanding of the imperfect manuscript; others from the editor's uncertainties as to Mr. Lanier's final wish at various points. When these came to my notice the book was in circulation, with plates stereotyped, and the only complete remedy lay in new plates. After thirteen years this remedy is about to be applied, and the coming December, it is hoped, will see The English Novel' again in circulation. It will have new and better type, a full index, and paragraphs that were omitted in the earlier edition." "The Science of English Verse" may prove to be of more permanent value; but at present "The English Novel" is a far more interesting work not only to the general reader, but also to the student of literature. It has the rare value of being stimulating, suggestive, and helpful at the same time, though its higher worth is in

the author's historical treatment of the development of personality, in his eloquent presentation of his theories of art and in much incidental interpretative and illuminating criticism. Prof. Morgan Callaway's synopsis, though brief, adequately presents the author's purpose. He says: "According to the author's statement the purpose of the book is, first, to inquire what is the special relation of the novel to the modern man, by virtue of which it has become a paramount literary form; and secondly, to illustrate this abstract inquiry, when completed, by some concrete readings in the greatest of modern English novelists." Addressing himself to the former, Lanier attempts to prove (1) that our time, when compared with that of Eschylus, shows an 66 enormous growth in the personality of man;" (2) that what we moderns call physical science, music, and the novel all had their origin at practically the

same time, about the middle of the seventeenth century; and (3) "that the increase of personalities thus going on has brought about such complexities of relation that the older forms of expression were inadequate to them; and that, the resulting necessity has developed the wonderfully free and elastic form of the modern novel out of the more rigid Greek drama, through the transition form of the Elizabethan drama." Then by way of illustration follows a detailed study of several of the novels of George Eliot, whom Lanier considered the greatest of English novelists.

Of vital interest, too, is Lanier's attitude to the effect of science upon the art of poetry and "art for art's sake." During his lifetime poetry was threatened with defeat by betrayal within her own household and with destruction from the strongly intrenched camp of modern science. It was more than in

timated in certain quarters that the poet, the novelist, and all imaginative literature, along with faith and a few other superfluous winged and mist-clad idealities, were to be abolished. How a mind "as truly philosophically and scientifically accurate as it was poetically sensuous and imaginative" would regard such an intimation is to be seen in this volume. After pointing out that while gravitation, oxygen, electromagnetism, the atomic theory, the spectroscope, the siren, are being evolved, the "Ode to St. Cecilia," the "Essay on Man," "Manfred," "A Man's a Man, for A' That," the "Ode on Immortality," "In Memoriam," the "Ode to a Nightingale," "The Psalm of Life" are being written, and after calling attention to Goethe, "at once pursuing science and poetry," he adds: "Now, if we examine the course and progress of this poetry, born thus within the very grasp and maw