T.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Alexander Pope. By Leslie Stephen. (English Men-of-Letters Series.) New
York: Harper & Brothers.
The interest of this series, which increases rather than diminishes--as
one might have feared would be the case--with each succeeding volume,
lies very much in the fact that the list of writers, almost as long and
varied as that of the subjects, is a representative one. It comprises
men who have won distinction in different departments--as novelists,
historians, scholars, scientific expounders--but who here meet in the
common field of biographical criticism and work together under the same
limitations and conditions. Hence their performances give us not so
much a measure of their individual powers as of the tone of thought and
intellectual depth of the class to which they belong. However diverse
their abilities and special fields of observation or research, their
general range of knowledge, methods of study and ideas of life are very
much the same. They are collectively "men of culture," as the writers
of Queen Anne's time were "wits," and it is the qualities associated
with that term, rather than any distinct gifts or characteristics, that
are here called into play.
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