The Athenæum.—“Mr. Dowden has condensed a remarkable amount of carefully formed judgments into his 400 pages. He has done it with so honest an intelligence that we can trust him alike when he writes of Rabelais and when he writes of Fénelon.... The book gives us a clearer and a more sympathetic notion of the spirit of French writers than any book, certainly which has been written in English.... Mr. Dowden is for the most part so just, because, whatever his personal preferences, he possesses pre-eminently a sane enthusiasm for literature as literature. Looking at literature as the self-expression of humanity, he is most attracted by those writers in whom what is called the human element is strongest.... Where his book is most valuable, most corrective of much that is unduly academic in the professional treatment of literature, is that he has realised literature in this living way, as being itself so living a thing.... A book which is certainly the best history of French Literature in the English language.”
The Saturday Review.—“This is a history of literature as histories of literature should be written. From beginning to end of this book, in which French Literature is chronicled from the Middle Ages to the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, there is not a page in which the writer is not seen successfully endeavouring to understand, sympathise with, and truthfully interpret writer after writer, Rabelais, Calvin, Victor Hugo.... His style has the singular merit of being a living voice, speaking to us with gravity and enthusiasm about the writers of many ages, and of being a human voice always.... Seeing sharply, definitely, he sees widely; and that moral quality, whose importance in literature he is so well aware of, gives to his own writing a grasp on realities, on what is essential in a man’s expression of himself, which the historian of literature but rarely possesses.... The more closely one looks into this book, the more clearly is it seen how much thought, how much mental selection, as well as how much reading, have gone to the making of these picturesque portraits of writers.”
Literatures of the World
Edited by EDMUND GOSSE, M.A.
III.
A History of
Modern English Literature
By
Edmund Gosse
Hon. M.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge