The same astonishing ignorance is displayed in a remark about Milton. We are told that in his youth he was “slightly subjected to influence from Spenser.” If Mr. Gosse had any adequate acquaintance with Milton and Spenser, he would have known that Spenser was to Milton almost what Homer was to Virgil, that Spenser’s influence simply pervades his poems, not his youthful poems only, but _Paradise Lost_ and even _Paradise Regained_. On page 194 we find this sentence: “From 1660 onwards ... what France originally, and then England, chose was the _imitatio veterum_, the Literature in prose and verse which seemed most closely to copy the models of Latin style. Aristotle and Horace were taken, not merely as patterns, but as arbiters.” It would be very interesting to know what English author took Aristotle as a pattern for style. Is Mr. Gosse acquainted with the characteristics of Aristotle’s style? Should he ever become so, he will probably have some sense of the immeasurable absurdity of asserting that our prose writers from 1660 onwards took that style for their model. On a par with this is the assertion that up to 1605 Bacon had mainly issued his works in “Ciceronian Latin.” Is Mr. Gosse aware of the meaning of “Ciceronian Latin”? Very “Ciceronian” indeed is Bacon’s Latinity, and particularly that of the _Meditationes Sacræ_, the only work published in Latin by Bacon up to 1605! It is scarcely necessary to say, in passing, that such works as Bacon had published up to 1605 were, with the one exception referred to, all in English. Nothing, it may be added, is so annoying in this book as its slushy dilettantism. Mr. Gosse appears to be incapable of accuracy and precision. Thus he tells us that Chaucer’s expedition to Italy in 1372 was “the first of several Italian expeditions.” Chaucer, so far as is known, visited Italy, after this, exactly once. Again, he tells us that the _Complaint of Mars_ and the _Parliament of Fowls_ are interesting as showing that Chaucer had completely abandoned his imitation of French models. Chaucer wrote several poems in the pure French style, and based on French models, after the date of these poems. Such would be the Rondel _Merciless Beauty_ suggested by Williamme d’Amiens, the _Compleynt of Venus_, partly adapted and partly translated from three Ballades by Sir Otes de Graunson, and the _Compleynt to his Empty Purse_, modelled on a Ballade by Eustache Deschamps, while French influence continued to modify his work throughout. On page 238 we are told that Thomson revived the Spenserian stanza; it had been revived by Pope, Prior, Shenstone, and Akenside. On page 151 we are informed that the first instalment of Clarendon’s History remained unprinted till 1752, and the rest of it till 1759. If Mr. Gosse knew anything about one of the most remarkable controversies of the eighteenth century, he would have known that the greater part of it was printed and published between