Art. I. THE MEANING OF LITERARY HISTORY. 1. A History of English Poetry. By W. J. Courthope. Four vols (in progress). London: Macmillan, 1895-1903. 2. A Short History of English Literature. By George Saintsbury. Second edition. London: Macmillan, 1903. 3. Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature. New edition. By David Patrick. Three vols. London and Edinburgh: Chambers, 1901-3.
4. English Literature: an illustrated record. By Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse. Four vols. London : Heinemann, 1903.
5. L'Histoire comparée des Littératures. Par Joseph Texte. 1896. In Études de Littérature européenne. Paris: A. Colin, 1898.
6. La Littérature comparée: Essai bibliographique. Par Louis P. Betz. Strassburg, 1900.
7. Columbia University Studies in Comparative Literature. 1898-1904.
THE idea that literature, being an art, must disown the antipathies of nations and belong to the world is now strongly rooted, and can but grow in power to quicken and to liberate. We think of the peoples of Europe and America, to go no farther, as one day forming a league of intellectual republics, where each absorbs from the others whatever conceptions, whatever forms of art, it can take without loss of independence. Such a federal hope, having once come to mankind, can hardly prove a mere vision of the night; for there is nothing higher to supersede it, and yet it can never be exhausted by realisation. Like all formative ideas, it began to work in men's minds long before it was consciously apprehended; Vol. 200.-No. 399.