





Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





LETTERS ON LITERATURE
by Andrew Lang


Contents:

Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry
Of Modern English Poetry
Fielding
Longfellow
A Friend of Keats
On Virgil
Aucassin and Nicolette
Plotinus (A.D. 200-262)
Lucretius
To a Young American Book-Hunter
Rochefoucauld
Of Vers de Societe
On Vers de Societe
Richardson
Gerard de Nerval
On Books About Red Men
Appendix I
Appendix II




DEDICATION


Dear Mr. Way,

_After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture a short
one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him, and only
know him by his many kindnesses?  Perhaps you will add another to these
by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a sort experimental in
English, and in prose, though Horace--in Latin and in verse--was
successful with it long ago_?

_Very sincerely yours_,

_A. LANG_.

_To W. J. Way_, _Esq_.
_Topeka_, _Kansas_.




PREFACE


These Letters were originally published in the _Independent_ of New York.
The idea of writing them occurred to the author after he had produced
"Letters to Dead Authors."  That kind of Epistle was open to the
objection that nobody _would_ write so frankly to a correspondent about
his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be
attempted again.  The _Lettres a Emilie sur la Mythologie_ are a well-
known model, but Emilie was not an imaginary correspondent.  The persons
addressed here, on the other hand, are all people of fancy--the name of
Lady Violet Lebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray's: gifted Hopkins is
the minor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Guardian Angel."  The
author's object has been to discuss a few literary topics with more
freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graver kind of
essay.  The Letter on Samuel Richardson is by a lady more frequently the
author's critic than his collaborator.




INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY


_To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas_.

Dear Wincott,--You write to me, from your "bright home in the setting
sun," with the flattering information that you have read my poor "Letters
to Dead Authors."  You are kind enough to say that you wish I would write
some "Letters to Living Authors;" but that, I fear, is out of the
question,--for me.

A thoughtful critic in the _Spectator_ has already remarked that the
great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles--if they
could read them.  Possibly not; but, like Prior, "I may write till they
can spell"--an exercise of which ghosts are probably as incapable as was
Matt's little Mistress of Quality.  But Living Authors are very different
people, and it would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one's
comments on them literally, in the French phrase, "to their address."  Yet
there is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.

Our old English essays, the papers in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, were
originally nothing but letters.  The vehicle permits a touch of personal
taste, perhaps of personal prejudice.  So I shall write my "Letters on
Literature," of the present and of the past, English, American, ancient,
or modern, to _you