ENGLISH LITERATURE NEW EDITION BY DAVID PATRICK, LL.D. A HISTORY CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHI- CAL OF AUTHORS IN THE ENGLISH VOLUME III. LONDON 20 20 AND EDINBURGH: W. & R. CHAMBERS, LIMITED 1903 ENVOY. The New Edition of the CYCLOPÆDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE is completed by the issue of a third volume little over two years after the appearance of the first. The first volume carried the history down to near the close of the seventeenth century; the second was mainly devoted to the men and women of the eighteenth. The third volume commences with the group of great writers who had begun their work in the eighteenth century, but were destined to be the glory of early nineteenth century letters; and, refusing to attempt a hard and fast line between nineteenth and twentieth, essays to bring down the story to the present time and include-under obvious limitations and conditions-the writers of the day. In a work of this kind-which is essentially a history-it would be out of place, even if it were possible, to attempt to deal with contemporaries as has been done with the men of the past; and the limits of the volume debar it from allotting to the incalculably more numerous writers of the present day-whose best work, it may be, is not yet given to the world—the same amount of illustrative quotation as has been conceded to the older writers. By favour of a few of the most eminent living authors, we are permitted to illustrate the brief articles on them with quotations from their choicest work. But in the case of the great majority of quite recent and living authors, it has been inevitable that the Cyclopædia should limit its scope to giving the essential biographical and bibliographical facts demanded in a work of reference, and for the rest to refer to their books, which are even now passing from hand to hand, and are to be found in every library. And of even the ablest of the younger writers of the day, by far the larger number are, along with some older authors not fully in the main currents of national literature, commemorated only by a brief paragraph in a complementary list of British authors-an earnest surely that erelong an additional or supplementary volume may be required to give more adequate treatment than is here possible to those with whom lies the nearer future of British letters. In such a volume some account of the several Celtic literatures of the British Isles, and their chief ornaments, might well find a place. The limitations of space and detail in regard to recent writers must obviously press more closely on the younger branches-on the literature of the United States and of the British dominions beyond the seas. And it may be anticipated that in any future supplement to this work the contributions of Greater Britain in the wider sense will occupy a space proportionately much larger than in the century which saw the daughter literatures arisefor the story of American national literature may fairly be said to begin with the century so recently closed. And therefore it has been found advantageous to give here, and not in an earlier volume, a brief history of the origins of American literature; yet of the authors separately treated there are only three who did not at least live into the nineteenth century. As in the corresponding British one, the complementary list of American authors is selective, suggesting rather than 'expressing multitude,' and does not pretend to be in any sense complete or exhaustive. The Editor and Publishers have again to thank the distinguished men -whose names will be found appended to their articles-who have contributed the large body of critical work to which this volume owes its main interest and value. They have further to thank Lord Tennyson for revising the article on his father, and for choosing the selections to be here presented in illustration of it; Mr Barrett Browning for his co-operation with the writer of the article on his father and mother; Mr Watts-Dunton for invaluable advice vi in regard to other articles than the three important ones he has himself contributed; Mr John Morley for revising the article on John Stuart Mill; President Schurman of Cornell University and Mr W. P. Garrison of the New York Nation for advice in regard to some of the important American articles. Mr Robert Aitken has written not a few of the unsigned articles, and has assisted the Editor by reading the proofs of them all. Their thanks are due to Mr Swinburne and Mr Watts-Dunton, to Mr Austin Dobson and Mr Gosse, to Mr Andrew Lang, to Mr Herbert Spencer and the late Mr Lecky, to Mr George Meredith, Mr Thomas Hardy and the late Mr Blackmore, to Dr J. K. Ingram and Mr T. D. Sullivan, to Professor Masson and Mr John Morley, for permission to quote here the poems or passages taken from their works. In the case of authors here and in America whose works are copyright, they have to thank the following publishers and owners of copyrights for their courteous permission to print the quotations hereinafter given; and they crave indulgence if they have unwittingly made encroachment on any right of literary property, or inadvertently failed here to make due and express acknowledgment of leave granted. |