838 THOMAS RAYNESFORD LOUNSBURY. 



find passages to prove that if he had chosen he might have been a 

 master of style. Here are two or three, taken at random as one reads. 

 Writing of Chaucer's character of the Knight, he closed a paragraph 

 thus: "He must be a man of honor, he must be a man of courage, 

 above all, he must be a gentleman in his feelings, his instincts, his 

 aspirations. He might be stupid; it was incumbent upon him to be 

 chivalrous. If his virtues were heroic, his \'ices accordingly had to 

 be of the same stamp. They must be of a bold and open sort. The 

 knight could be licentious and arrogant and even cruel; the thing 

 forbidden him was to be petty and mean and false." (Studies in 

 Chaucer, II, 481-2). Again, he could summarize Warton's opinion 

 of Chaucer in words like these : " In his eyes Chaucer was a Goth 

 — a Goth of genius, to be sure — but still a Goth. Being a Goth, he 

 had not the severe self-restraint of the moderns, their chastity of 

 diction, their propriety of manner; in fine, their Art." (Studies in 

 Chaucer, III, 250). Better still, when touching on an edition of 

 Chaucer once projected by Samuel Johnson, he thus concludes, 

 "Scholarship suffered no loss by the failure to carry out a scheme 

 which was probably never more than vaguely thought about. Liter- 

 ary criticism certainly has. An edition of Chaucer by Johnson could 

 never have been an authority, but it would always have proved an 

 entertainment." (Studies in Chaucer, I, 299). You must search far 

 and long to find criticism or parody better than that. 



Another feature of his learned books bespeaks if not literary con- 

 science at least literary instinct. One may fairlj^ doubt whether any 

 other American scholar of the nineteenth century was capable of 

 disfiguring so few pages with footnotes. On general principles, every- 

 body would probably agree that what belongs in a book ought to be 

 there and that what does not belong there ought to be left out; in 

 general practice, the Germanic passion of American scholars for 

 annotating their own texts rivals Lounsbury's passion for the neuter 

 pronoun. Lounsbury's repugnance for this kind of troublous cant 

 was part of his pervasive common-sense. He carried it, indeed, almost 

 to excess. More than once, as you read his torrents of authoritative 

 statements, you would be glad if he had given you more references to 

 supplement or to verify what he says. All the while, you rejoice 

 that when he chose to say anything he said it out loud and not in the 

 whisper of small print. 



Lounsbury's third trilogy comprises his most nearly popular work. 

 Originally written for Harper's INIa'gazine, or other similar periodicals, 

 his papers on Pronunciation in English, on Usage in English, and on 

 English Spelling at once delighted the cock-sure and enraged the metic- 



