says that Longfellow “brought to his work in the college no special love of teaching,” but “a deep love of literature and that unacademic attitude toward his work which was a liberalizing power” (page 66). He touches equally well that subtle quality of Longfellow’s temperament, so difficult to delineate, when he says of him: “He gave of himself freely to his intimate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in a charmed circle, beyond the lines of which men could not penetrate” (page 68). These admirable statements sufficiently indicate the rare quality of Mr. Scudder’s work. So far as especial passages go, Mr. Scudder never surpassed the best chapters of “Men and Letters,” but his one adequate and complete work as a whole is undoubtedly, apart from his biographies, the volume entitled “Childhood in Literature and Art” (1894). This book was based on a course of Lowell lectures given by him in Boston, and is probably that by which he himself would wish to be judged, at least up to the time of his excellent biography of Lowell. He deals in successive chapters with Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Mediæval, English, French, German, and American literary art with great symmetry and unity throughout, culminating, of course, in Hawthorne and analyzing the portraits of children drawn in his productions. In this book one may justly say that he has added himself, in a degree, to the immediate circle of those very few American writers whom he commemorates so nobly at the close of his essay on “Longfellow and his Art,” in “Men and Letters”: “It is too early to make a full survey of the immense importance to American letters of the work done by half-a-dozen great men in the middle of this century. The body of prose and verse created by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which other structures are to rise; the humanity which it holds is entering into the life of the country, and no material invention, or scientific discovery, or institutional prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for generations to come” (page 69).