The statement that “so miserable is the poverty of the first half of the seventeenth century, when we have mentioned Pecock and Capgrave, there is no other prose writer to be named,” is bad enough. But to sum up Pecock’s work with the remark, “the matter is paradoxical and casuistical reasoning on controversial points, in which he secures the sympathy neither of the new thought nor the old,” is to demonstrate that Mr. Gosse knows nothing whatever about it. The _Repressor_ is in many important respects one of the most remarkable works in our early prose Literature. It would be interesting to know what is the meaning of the following: “The masterpiece of Chillingworth stands almost alone in a sort of underwood of Theophrastian character sketches.” Does Mr. Gosse suppose that English prose Literature in and about 1637 is represented by Hall’s _Characters of Vices and Virtues_, by Sir Thomas Overbury’s _Characters_, and by Earle’s _Microcosmographie_, which appeared respectively, not in and about 1637, but in 1608, in 1614, and in 1628? If this was the underwood in which Chillingworth’s work stood, it stood also in a dense forest represented by some of the most celebrated prose writings of the seventeenth century, such as the greater part of the writings of Bacon and of Raleigh, the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Selden’s _Titles of Honour_ and _Mare Clausum_, Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s _De Veritate_, Feltham’s _Resolves_, the best of Hall’s writings, Purchas’ _Pilgrims_, Barclay’s _Argenis_, the Histories of Speed, Stowe, Hayward, and Raleigh, Heylin’s _Microcosmus_, Prynne’s _Histrio-Mastix_, and the famous sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, all of which appeared between 1608 and 1637. These are the sort of remarks in which Mr. Gosse habitually indulges. We have another example in the following: “Shelley’s attitude to style is in the main retrograde,” a generalization based on the fact that he was no admirer of “the arabesque of the cockney school.” But were Shelley’s chief contemporaries admirers of the arabesque of the cockney school, or were they affected by it? Was Wordsworth, was Coleridge, or Southey, or Byron, or Crabbe, or Campbell, or Landor?--a question which Mr. Gosse probably never stopped to ask himself. On a par with this is the absurd assertion that “English poetry was born again during the autumn months of 1797.” The appearance of the _Lyrical Ballads_ did not make, but mark, an era in our poetry. The revolution of which they were the expression had been maturing, as surely but distinctly as the social and political revolution marked by the assembly of the States-General ten years before. There was hardly a note struck in the _Lyrical Ballads_ which had not been struck in our poetry between 1740 and the date of their appearance.