If our review of this book shall seem unduly harsh, we are sorry, but a more exasperating writer than Professor Saintsbury, with his indifference to all that should be dear to a scholar, the mingled coarseness, triviality and dogmatism of his tone, the audacious nonsense of his generalisations, and the offensive vulgarity of his diction and style--a very well of English defiled--we have never had the misfortune to meet with. Turn where we will in this work, to the opinions expressed in it, to the sentiments, to the verdicts, to the style, the note is the same,--the note of the _Das Gemeine_. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 12: Page 37.] [Footnote 13: Eá lâ drihtenes þrym! eá lâ duguða helm! eá lâ meotodes miht! eá lâ middaneard! eá lâ däg leóhta! eá lâ dreám godes! eá lâ engla þreát! eá lâ upheofon! eá lâ þät ic eam ealles leás êcan dreámes, þät ic mid handum ne mäg heofon geræcan ne mid eágum ne môt up lôcian ne hûru mid eárum ne sceal æfre gehêran þære byrhtestan bêman stefne. --_Satan._ edit. Grein, 164-172. ] [Footnote 14: _Some Remarks on Lydgate._ Gray, Aldine Ed. v. 292-321.] [Footnote 15: That Lydgate’s verse should occasionally be rough and halting is partly to be attributed to the wretched state in which his text has come down to us from the copyists, and partly to the arbitrary way in which he varies the accent. His heroic couplets in the _Storie of Thebes_ are certainly very unmusical. For the whole question of his versification see Dr. Schick, Introduction to his edition of _The Temple of Glas_, pp. liv.-lxiii., and Schipper, _Altenglische Metrik_, 492-500. But neither of these scholars does justice to the exquisite music of his verse at its best.] [Footnote 16: Page 474.] [Footnote 17: Page 150.] [Footnote 18: Page 63.] OUR LITERARY GUIDES II. A SHORT HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE[19] [Footnote 19: _A Short History of Modern English Literature._ By Edmund Gosse. London, 1898.]