1702 and 1704, and frequently reprinted between 1704 and 1731. There is not a chapter in the book which does not teem with errors. Trissino’s _Sofonisba_ was not the only work in which blank verse had attained any prominence in Italy about 1515; it had been employed in works equally prominent, by Rucellai in his _Rosmunda_, and in his _Oreste_, as well as in his didactic poem _L’Api_, and by Alamanni in his _Antigone_, all of which were composed within a few years of that date. On page 120 we are told that Davies was the first to employ, on a long flight, the heroic quatrain; it had been employed by Spenser in a poem extending to nearly a thousand lines. Nor was Surrey’s essay in _terza rima_ “the earliest in the language.” Chaucer made the same experiment, though a little irregularly, in the _Compleynt to his Lady_. We are told on page 79 that Gascoigne was “the first translator of Greek tragedy.” Gascoigne never translated a line from the Greek. His _Jocasta_, to which presumably the reference is made, is simply an adaptation of Ludovico Dolce’s _Giocasta_. On page 25 we are informed that “Gower’s French verse has mainly disappeared.” Gower is not known to have written anything in French except the _Ballades_ and the _Speculum Meditantis_, both of which are extant, as it is inexcusable in any historian of English Literature not to know. The account given on page 25 of the _Confessio Amantis_ shows that Mr. Gosse is very imperfectly acquainted with what he so fluently criticises, or he would have been aware that the seventh book is purely episodical and has nothing whatever to do with “The lover’s symptoms and experience.” In the account of Pope we are informed that “Boileau discouraged love poetry and Pope did not seriously attempt it.” Pope is the author of the most famous love poem in the eighteenth century, _Eloisa to Abelard_, to say nothing of the _Elegy to an Unfortunate Lady_, of the beautiful hymn to Love in the second chorus in the tragedy of _Brutus_, and the exquisite fragment supposed to have been addressed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. “The satires of Pope,” he continues, “would not have been written but for those of his French predecessor.” Can Mr. Gosse possibly be ignorant that the satires of Pope are modelled on the Satires and Epistles of Horace, that they owe absolutely nothing to Boileau, not even the hint for applying Roman satire to modern times, as he had precedents in his own countrymen Dryden and Rochester?