Mr. Gosse’s criticism is often very amusing, as here, speaking of Gibbon: “Perhaps he leaned on the strength of his style too much, and _sacrificed the abstract to the concrete_.” Of all historians who have ever lived, Gibbon is the most “abstract” and has most sacrificed the “concrete” to the “abstract,” as every student of history knows. On a par with this is the prodigious statement (p. 291) that there is “an absence of emotional imagination” in Burke! That excellent man, Mr. Pecksniff, was, we are told, in the habit of using any word that occurred to him as having a fine sound and rounding a sentence well, without much care for its meaning; “and this,” says his biographer “he did so boldly and in such an imposing manner that he would sometimes stagger the wisest people and make them gasp again.” This is precisely Mr. Gosse’s method. About the propriety of his epithets and statements, so long as they sound well, he never troubles himself; sometimes they are so vague as to mean anything, as often they have no meaning at all, as here: “His [that is Shelley’s] style, carefully considered, is seen to rest on a basis built about 1760, from which it is every moment springing and sparkling, like a fountain, in columns of ebullient lyricism.” Could pure nonsense go further? We have another illustration of the same audacity of absurd assertion on page 260. We are there informed--Mr. Gosse is speaking of our prose literature about the centre of the eighteenth century--that “Philosophy by this time had become detached from _belles lettres_; it was now quite indifferent to those who practised it, whether their sentences were harmonious or no.... Philosophy in fact quitted literature.” If there was any period in our prose literature when philosophy was in the closest alliance with belles lettres, and was most studious of the graces of style, it was between about 1750 and 1771. In those years appeared Hutcheson’s _System of Moral Philosophy_, Adam Smith’s _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, one of the most eloquent philosophical treatises ever written, Burke’s _Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful_, Reid’s _Inquiry into the Human Mind_, Tucker’s _Light of Nature Pursued_, Beattie’s _Essay on Truth_, to say nothing of Hume’s _Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals_, his _Political Discourses_, and his _Natural History of Religion_, all of them works pre-eminently distinguished by the graces of style, while so far from philosophy quitting belles lettres, it was during these years that the foundations of philosophical criticism were laid by Burke, Harris, Hurd, Kames, and others. Mr. Gosse appears to have forgotten that he had himself told us (p. 205) that Shaftesbury’s style set the example of the prose which was to mark the central years of the century! Thus again Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_ is “an entertaining neurotic compendium”; Bacon’s _Essays_ are “often mere notations ... enlarged in