AYS BY DIVERS HANDS BEING THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE AL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE OF THE UNITED KINGDOM NEW SERIES VOL. IV EDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE. LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. MDCCCCXXIV. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION. EDMUND GOSSE, C.B., LL.D., D.LITT., F.R.S.L. THE diversity of critical opinion is a matter which iously troubles some ingenuous souls, but is isaged with indifference by those of the bolder t. It certainly does not trouble the dreams of the yal Society of Literature. An examination of our nual 'Transactions' will prove that we offer to se of our members who oblige us with the results their meditation the greatest possible latitude of nion. The paradox of criticism is that all literary ression must be supported by and even confined hin the limit of certain principles, while yet, de those bounds, every cultivated person is a law o himself. Professor Warwick Bond is painfully rcised over the badness of modern reviewing, and, doubt, the newspapers, and especially those of st pretention, do sometimes express disconcerting - even disruptive opinions. But, at the very ment when this is depressing us so much, Mr. nkwater comes with his cheery paper on William y, and shows us that, although the "views" of author of 'Ionica' were as eccentric and irrensible as those of any newspaper of to-day, he self, the odd, violent, half-inspired schoolmasterorian, was a figure not merely of real intellectual ortance, but one that holds a place in the general cession of literature, |