_Literary Historians._--Widely interested as the scholars of this country have been in the greater writers and the more important literature of other lands, there has been no dearth of attention to our own. Moses Coit Tyler (1835-1900), sometime professor of American history at Cornell University, was the author of two valuable works, “History of American Literature during the Colonial Times” (1878) and “Literary History of the American Revolution” (1897). Charles Francis Richardson (born in 1851), professor of English in Dartmouth College, has covered the whole range of our literary history down to 1885 in his “American Literature” (1887); and Barrett Wendell (born in 1855) of Harvard University, in his “Literary History of America” (1901), has brought his treatment of the same topic down to the beginning of the present century. Professor Wendell has written upon other American topics in “Stelligeri” (1893), and “A Life of Cotton Mather” (1891). More recently he has published two works, both the result of his residence abroad as a lecturing professor: the substance of the first, “The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature” (1904), was delivered before Trinity College, Cambridge; that of the second, “The France of To-Day” (1907) was gathered while he was giving a course of lectures in Paris. Members of other American college faculties have given evidence of minute research and strong inspiration in books not a few. James Brander Matthews (born in 1852) of Columbia University, and George Edward Woodberry (born in 1855), for many years connected with the same university, have both written books that have gained popular approval; of the former, “French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century” (1881) and “The Historical Novel” (1901) certainly deserve mention; of the latter, “The Life of Poe” (1885) and “The Appreciation of Literature” (1907). No less significant than these men are Felix Emmanuel Schelling (born in 1858) of the University of Pennsylvania, whose latest work is “The Elizabethan Drama” (1908), and Vida Dutton Scudder (born in 1861) of Wellesley College, who cannot be left unnoticed, so thorough and satisfactory are her “Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets” (1895) and “Social Ideals in English Letters” (1898). Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, has spared time from his political and historical studies to write an interesting volume of essays called “Mere Literature” (1896); President Wilson’s former colleague, Bliss Perry (born in 1860), now editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_ and professor of belles-lettres at Harvard, has published a valuable “Study of Prose Fiction” (1902), and another Princeton professor, Henry Jackson Van Dyke (born in 1852), has written an especially useful study called “The Poetry of Tennyson” (1889), and has also shown himself a master of the leisurely essay in “Little Rivers” (1895) and “Fisherman’s Luck” (1899).