836 THOMAS RAYNESFORD LOUNSBURY. 



A shrewd contemporary of his, at another college, was apt to say that 

 books are alive, that books about books are anaemic, and that books 

 about books about books are still-born. In his writing as in his talk 

 Lounsbury was red-blooded and always animated. As one turns the 

 pages of his volumes, though, one sometimes suspects that the greatest 

 wonder of all about him is that he could manage to make a constant 

 impression of A'igor in works which may so nearly be generalized as 

 books about books about books. 



This is not the case throughout, to be sure. His little handbook 

 on the English Language, compact from the conditions of its limits, 

 states the facts as they were ascertained in 1879 so firmly and with 

 such animation that after forty years it still seems an authority. His 

 Life of Cooper is an excellent piece of literary biography, where you 

 may find not only faithful portraiture set in veracious historic back- 

 grovmd, and supplemented by compact critical comment, but now and 

 again pearls of such water as that which we took from its setting a 

 little while ago. His Studies in Chaucer, generally deemed his 

 principal work, may justly be called diffuse and disorderly; but, for 

 all their voluble vagrancies, they unquestionably accomplish the 

 essential task of books about books. They make you eager to read 

 the poet they concern, impatient again to open his pages which they 

 irradiate with countless gleams of new light, and above all aware of 

 what manner of human being that poet was, the greatest gentleman 

 who ever made English poetry. When we come to Lounsbury's 

 second trilogy, however, which has to do with Shakespeare, the case is 

 different. Shakespeare lurks in the background; the foreground is 

 full of faintly reanimated folks who between his time and ours have 

 had opinions about him. The tireless erudition displayed throughout 

 is beyond compare; Lounsbury read more extinct criticism, you grow 

 to feel, than would have seemed within the range of human power. 

 What is more, his own vigor gives his statements about this forgotten 

 stuff a semblance of animation. But, after all, discussions of such 

 things as the Unities and as Eighteenth Century Views do not lead 

 you into the heart of Hamlet or of The Tempest; and if Voltaire had 

 done nothing but first praise and then jealously blame the greatest 

 of English poets we should trouble ourselves no more about Voltaire; 

 and when it comes to The Text of Shakespeare, the matter leads us 

 rather to the murky depths of the Dunciad than either to anything 

 Pope lives by or a bit to the poetry with which Theobold dealt so 

 faithfully as to rouse Pope's hateful spite. Lounsbury's Virginia 

 lectures on the early career of Browning, too, tell you not so much 



