The author of this work has plainly not pondered the advice of Horace, “Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam viribus.” His ambitious purpose is “to give the reader, whether familiar with books or not, a feeling of the evolution of English Literature in the primary sense of the term,” and he adds that “to do this without relation to particular authors and particular works seems to me impossible.” This may be conceded; for, a feeling of the evolution of English or of any other literature, without reference to particular authors and particular books, would be analogous to the capacity for feeling without anything to feel. But, unfortunately, those of Mr. Gosse’s readers who wish to have the feeling to which he refers will merely find the conditions without which, as he so justly observes, the said feeling is impossible. In other words, references, in the form of loose and desultory gossip, to particular authors and particular works chronologically arranged, are all that represent the “evolution” of which he is so anxious “to give a feeling.” Described simply, the work is an ordinary manual of English Literature in which, with Mr. Humphry Ward’s _English Poets_, Sir Henry Craik’s _English Prose Writers_, Chambers’ _Cyclopædia of English Literature_, the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and the like before him, the writer tells again the not unfamiliar story of the course of our Literature from Chaucer to the present time. But Mr. Gosse is no mere compiler, and brings to his task certain qualifications of his own, a vague and inaccurate but extensive knowledge of our seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century Belles Lettres; and here, as a rule, he can acquit himself creditably. Though far from a sound, he is a sympathetic critic; he has an agreeable but somewhat affected style, and can gossip pleasantly and plausibly about subjects which are within the range indicated. But at this point, as is painfully apparent, his qualifications for being an historian and critic of English Literature end. The moment he steps out of this area he is at the mercy of his handbooks; so completely at their mercy that he does not even know how to use them. And it is here that Mr. Gosse becomes so irritating, partly because of the sheer audacity with which mere inferences are substituted for facts and simple assumptions for deduced generalizations, and partly because of the habitual employment of phraseology so vague and indeterminate that it is difficult to submit what it conveys to positive test. These are serious charges to bring against any writer; and if they cannot be abundantly substantiated, a still more serious charge may justly be urged against the accuser.