ESSAYS BY DIVERS HANDS BEING THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE NEW SERIES VOL. IV EDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE. LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. MDCCCCXXIV. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION. BY EDMUND GOSSE, C.B., LL.D., D.LITT., F.R.S.L. THE diversity of critical opinion is a matter which seriously troubles some ingenuous souls, but is envisaged with indifference by those of the bolder sort. It certainly does not trouble the dreams of the Royal Society of Literature. An examination of our annual Transactions' will prove that we offer to those of our members who oblige us with the results of their meditation the greatest possible latitude of opinion. The paradox of criticism is that all literary expression must be supported by and even confined within the limit of certain principles, while yet, inside those bounds, every cultivated person is a law unto himself. Professor Warwick Bond is painfully exercised over the badness of modern reviewing, and, no doubt, the newspapers, and especially those of most pretention, do sometimes express disconcerting and even disruptive opinions. But, at the very moment when this is depressing us so much, Mr. Drinkwater comes with his cheery paper on William Cory, and shows us that, although the "views" of the author of Ionica' were as eccentric and irresponsible as those of any newspaper of to-day, he himself, the odd, violent, half-inspired schoolmasterhistorian, was a figure not merely of real intellectual importance, but one that holds a place in the general procession of literature. |