Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by DavidPrice, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

LETTERS ON LITERATURE
by Andrew Lang

Contents:

Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry
Of Modern English Poetry
Fielding
Longfellow
A Friend of Keats
On Virgil
Aucassin and Nicolette
Plotinus (A.D. 200-262)
Lucretius
To a Young American Book-Hunter
Rochefoucauld
Of Vers de Société
On Vers de Société
Richardson
Gérard de Nerval
On Books About Red Men
Appendix I
Appendix II

DEDICATION

Dear Mr. Way,

After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venturea short one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him,and only know him by his many kindnesses?  Perhaps you will addanother to these by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of asort experimental in English, and in prose, though Horace—in Latinand in verse—was successful with it long ago?

Very sincerely yours,

A. LANG.

To W. J. Way, Esq.
Topeka, Kansas.

PREFACE

These Letters were originally published in the Independentof New York.  The idea of writing them occurred to the author afterhe had produced “Letters to Dead Authors.”  That kindof Epistle was open to the objection that nobody would writeso frankly to a correspondent about his own work, and yet it seemedthat the form of Letters might be attempted again.  The Lettresà Emilie sur la Mythologie are a well-known model, but Emiliewas not an imaginary correspondent.  The persons addressed here,on the other hand, are all people of fancy—the name of Lady VioletLebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray’s: gifted Hopkins is theminor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Guardian Angel.” The author’s object has been to discuss a few literary topicswith more freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graverkind of essay.  The Letter on Samuel Richardson is by a lady morefrequently the author’s critic than his collaborator.

INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY

To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas.

Dear Wincott,—You write to me, from your “bright homein the setting sun,” with the flattering information that youhave read my poor “Letters to Dead Authors.”  You arekind enough to say that you wish I would write some “Letters toLiving Authors;” but that, I fear, is out of the question,—forme.

A thoughtful critic in the Spectator has already remarkedthat the great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles—ifthey could read them.  Possibly not; but, like Prior, “Imay write till they can spell”—an exercise of which ghostsare probably as incapable as was Matt’s little Mistress of Quality. But Living Authors are very different people, and it would be perilous,as well as impertinent, to direct one’s comments on them literally,in the French phrase, “to their address.”  Yet thereis no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.

Our old English essays, the papers in the Tatler and Spectator,were originally nothing but letters.  The vehicle permits a touchof personal taste, perhaps of personal prejudice.  So I shall writemy “Letters on Literature,” of the present and of the past,English, American, ancient, or modern, to you, in your distantKansas, or to such other correspondents as are kind enough to read thesenotes.

Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions.  PoorPoetry!  She is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led outfirst at banquets, though many would prefer to sit next some livelierand younger Muse, the lady of fiction, or even the chattering soubretteof journalism.  Seniores p