To turn to the work. On page 85 Mr. Gosse favours us with the following account of the _Faerie Queene_: “A certain grandeur which sustains the three great Cantos of Truth, Temperance, and Chastity fades away as we proceed.... The structure of it is loose and incoherent when we compare it with the epic grandeur of the masterpieces of Ariosto and Tasso.” It would be difficult to match this; every word which is not a blunder is an absurdity. Where are “the three great Cantos”? Can Mr. Gosse possibly be ignorant that the poem is divided into books, each book containing twelve Cantos? Assuming, however, that he has confounded books with Cantos, where is the great book dealing with ‘Truth’? As he places it before ‘Temperance,’ we presume that he means the first book and that he has confounded ‘Truth’ with ‘Holiness.’ This is pretty well, to begin with. Where, we next ask in amazement, is the ‘grandeur’ which sustains the prolix farrago of the third book, and which ‘fades away’ as we proceed to the only book which almost rivals the first and second, the fifth, and the sublimest portion of the whole work, the superb Cantos which represent all that remains of the seventh? What, we gasp, is the meaning of the ‘epic grandeur’ of Ariosto? and “the loose and incoherent structure” of the _Faerie Queene_ when compared with that of the _Orlando Furioso_? Could any poem be more loose and incoherent in structure than the _Orlando_, or any term be less appropriate to its tone and style than ‘grandeur’? On page 80 he actually tells us that Fox’s well-known _Book of Martyrs_ was written in Latin and translated by John Day, and that it is John Day’s translation of the Latin original which represents that work, confounding Fox’s _Commentarii Rerum in Ecclesiâ gestarum_, etc., printed at Basil with the _Acts and Monuments of the Church_, and making John Day, the publisher of it, the translator of it into English! And this is his account of one of the most celebrated works in our language. Of Swift’s _Sentiments of a Church of England Man_, we have the following account: “That such a tract as the _Sentiments of a Church of England Man_, with its gusts of irony, its white heat of preposterous moderation, led on towards Junius is obvious.” This is an excellent example of the confidence which may be placed in Mr. Gosse’s assertions. Of this pamphlet, it may be sufficient to say that there is not a single touch of irony or satire in it; that it stands almost alone among Swift’s tracts for its perfectly temperate and logical tone; it is a calm appeal to pure reason. There is the same audacity of assertion in classing Feltham’s _Resolves_ with Hall’s and Overbury’s Character Sketches, and Earle’s _Microcosmogonie_ as “a typical example” of “a curious school of comic or ironic portraiture, partly ethical and partly dramatic.” In 1625, we are told that Bacon completed the _Sylva Sylvarum_. If Mr. Gosse knew anything of Bacon’s