Steinhold and Hopkins' metrical version of the Psalms,-that it is a work of necessity rather than of mercy. of Dr. Gosse's volume suggests a cursory "record" more closely than does Dr. Garnett's,-indeed, he himself calls it "a summary sketch." This may be due in part to a stricter following out of the plan of the work, but probably is to be accounted for also by the greater pressure biographical material and by the fact that, unlike Dr. Garnett, Dr. Gosse, dealing with a period he has already treated in a fuller history, constantly incurred the risk of seeming merely to repeat himself. He has managed most skilfully to avoid the imputation of giving his readers a tale told twice by himself, although, as has been said, the arrangement of the biographical sketches and of the selections often disturbs the flow of the text in a way that will irritate some readers. The book reads itself easily, however, and if occasionally the style seems to give evidence of hurry, it might fairly be contended that in many pages and passages its author is as graceful and illuminating as in anything he has previously written. It would be pleasant to cull his striking sentences-for example, this with regard to Milton, "His brain was not an empty conventicle, stored with none but the necessities of devotion; it was hung round with the spoils of paganism and garlanded with Dionysiac ivy." Such an anthology is not wanted here, but the fact that it might be made should keep us from emphasizing the trivial not to say gossippy character of some of the biographical information, and from expostulating against the excessive depreciation of Milton's prose, the slight attention given to Marbell, and other similar matters. Dr. Gosse, as he states in his preface, has carefully considered the great array of writers falling within his field, and has enlarged upon them, omitted them, or sleighted them, as seemed best in his judgment. That he will not always carry the assent of his readers and critics has been clear to him from the start, and he has doubtless provided himself with a store of courteous smiles of explanation and defence which he need not draw upon so far as the present article is concerned. The special merits of Dr. Gosse's instalment seem to be three in number. The first is his resolute grasp upon the essential facts of literary evolution and his power to make his narrative give the reader the proper sense of movement. The merit was abundantly seen in the volume entitled "Modern English Literature," contributed by Dr. Gosse some years since to his well known series of short literary histories. The second is his constant comparison of English with other literatures,-in the case of this volume necessarily with French literature in the main,— a merit which he shares with his collaborator, Dr. Garnett. The third and perhaps the most important of the three, is his clear perception of the fact that literature is not a term to be narrowed by the arbitrary limitations imposed by adherents of a cramped and on the whole barren system of æsthetics. In other words, he recognizes that the intellect as well as the imagination has its part to play in literary creation, and he perceives with unerring sagacity the importance to English literature and the English mind of the often calumniated period from 1660 to 1780 and in particular of the two great poets so frequently denied the homage that is their due,―John Dryden and Alexander Pope. That one and the same writer should be able to give us in one volume such admirable appreciations as we find here of the poetry of these two men and of John Milton is a sign, let us hope, that the day, or rather the night of choatic impressionism in criticism is wearing to its close. But perhaps this paper may fittingly come to an abrupt close with the following quotation, which ostensibly applies to the ending of the seventeenth century, yet is not without its lessons to the opening of the twentieth : "All this is much out of fashion nowadays, and to our impressionist critics, eager for sensations,-for the 'new note,' for an 'individual manner',—must seem preposterous and ridiculous. But a writer like Dryden, responsible for the movement of literature in the years immediately succeeding the Restoration, had a grave task before him. He was face to face with a bankruptcy; he had to float a new concern on the spot where the old had sunken. That uniformity of manner, that lack of salient and picturesque individuality, which annoy the hasty reader, were really unavoidable. Dryden and Follotson, Locke and Olway, with their solicitude for lucidity of language, rigidity of form, and closeness of reasoning, were laying anew the foundations upon which literature might once more be built. It is better to build upon Malherbe and Dryden, even if we think the ground plan a little dull, than upon Marino and Gongora." T JOSEPH B. BISHOP NEW YORK HERE are many signs that the Wilmington lynching of last June has startled the country out of a dangerous condition of mind toward this form of anarchy. That thousands of intelligent people in the North had come to look upon it, not merely with indifference but with approval, cannot be denied. One heard approval expressed on all sides, and so strong was the current running in that direction that disapproval could scarcely be expressed without calling forth the taunt, "Then you are in favor of rape." The arguments put forth in the South were accepted as satisfactory. It was believed that the lynchings were confined nearly or quite entirely to one form of crime, that they were inspired by a stern and even righteous determination to secure swift and sure justice, and that they were resorted to in order to spare the victims of that crime the humiliation of testifying in open court. That all these arguments are based upon misrepresentation, that they are partly false and wholly specious can be shown by statistics whose accuracy is beyond question. The shock of the Wilmington incident turned the attention of the whole country to this subject, and the result has been a "campaign of education" that cannot fail to be of lasting value. One could but smile to see such headings in the newspapers as "Lynching is Anarchy" and "Law is the Bulwark of Social Order," but these only showed the extraordinary condition of the public mind. Surely a civilized nation that needed to be told that lynching was anarchy, and needed to have the information backed up with argument and reasoning had drifted far from its moorings. The Wilmington affair was certainly well calculated to give the needed shock of alarm. It did not occur in a frontier community, or in a back county of a southern State, but in a city situated midway between New York and Washington, and within little more than a hundred miles of either place. It was a thoroughly civilized city in a thoroughly civilized State, and yet in it a mob of five thousand people, aroused to blind fury by the incendiary appeals of a professed Christian minister, overpowered the officers of the law, took the execution of the law out of the hands of the courts, and seizing a criminal put him to death by torture in the presence of women and children. "Public sentiment here," said the news despatches, "as far as expressed appears to approve Copyright, 1903, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved. the lynching." For several days the mob held full sway, overawing both the city and the state government, and emerging from the trial of strength virtually supreme. The clergyman who had incited the mob to its crime was so incapable of realizing the awful responsibility that rested upon him that he was able to say after the fiendish act was ended: "I believe that if the judges had granted, even yesterday, the request for a speedy trial the machinery of the law would have brought about what was accomplished last night. I trust the lesson of this terrible calamity will impress men of similar passions, warning them of the dangers of sin, and also impress upon our courts the need for speedy justice in infamous crimes." Other clergymen in the North, in Chicago, and elsewhere, took a similar view, assuming that speedy justice was the impelling motive of the crime, and that lynching was justifiable in all such offenses. It was also assumed by them that the mob that tortured the negro to death was composed mainly of respectable citizens who took the law into their own hands because the machinery of the law was either slow or could not be trusted to deal out impartial justice. A Brooklyn clergyman of a far different type from those quoted above, went to Wilmington to investigate these points and reported after his return that the mob was not composed of "representative, respectable citizens," as the accounts stated, but of the most disorderly and vicious elements of the community, including several ex-convicts. There was no more tangible ground for the second assumption, namely, that the courts could not be trusted to give speedy justice. Like the "respectable mob" contention, that was a falsehood invented to excuse a brutal and unjustifiable crime. Before considering the question of the constitution of lynching mobs, and the motives which impel them, let us examine the statistics of lynchings for the past twenty years. These have been compiled each year by the Chicago Tribune," and are as follows: |