of Chaucer, and the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons
to him--old Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour."
The product of a large store of reading has been here secreted anew
for the reader who desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and
shade of a long and varied period of poetic literature, by way of
preparation for Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the
volume closes,) explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained
by literary antecedents.

That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
typical, prose of Dryden. In Dryden, and his followers through the
eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
cognizable rather as bad taste. But such reaction was effective only
because an age had come--the age of a negative, or agnostic
philosophy--in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way
of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's
moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and
manners themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and
harmonious, can be seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's
Selections from Steele (Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful
"Life." The well-known qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original
work are a sufficient guarantee of the taste and discrimination we
may look for in a collection like this, in which the random
lightnings of the first of the essayists are grouped under certain
heads--"Character Sketches," "Tales and Incidents," "Manners and
Fashions," and the like--so as to diminish, for the general reader,