dilemma; to assume that the use in poetry, with whatever individuality, of motives or figures that have been used before, stamps it as insincere or rhetorical. The sonnet, when Shakespeare took it up, was already & highly conventional form, and had gathered a rich panoply of traditional imagery, sentiment and stylistic device, which belonged only less than its rhythm and its rhyme to the recognised resources of expression and effect. Would a poet who chose this conventional but potent and beautiful form as the vehicle of a real situation eschew all these other conventions incident to its use? Would he not rather take them up into his work and touch them to finer issues? But this is precisely what Shakespeare in his sonnets, as Dr Lee fully recognises, has done. Yet he makes few and somewhat grudging concessions to the 'real situation' theory of their origin. We are grateful for the admirable scholarship and penetrating research which has made the French contribution to Elizabethan literature so clear, but we do not think that it perceptibly affects the literary problem of the sonnets.

It is a grave loss to Elizabethan studies that no literary history of that great age, comparable to the splendid contributions of France, has yet been received from Germany. Ten Brink, the unequalled historian of our earlier literature, died just as he approached the age of Shakespeare which it was his highest ambition to paint; and Prof. Alois Brandl, who proposed to take up the task, and is the man in Germany most capable of it, appears to have indefinitely postponed it. The appetite of the German public has, in the meantime, been satisfied by popular handbooks, some of them incredibly bad. Intermediate, however, between the fabrications of the Engels and Koertings and the masterpiece of Ten Brink stands the solid and scholarly work of the late Richard Wülker. As the best existing German treatise it may be briefly noticed here. Its profusion of illustrations from portraits and documents would in any case give it definite value. As literary history its strength lies not in criticism but in information, and particularly in the résumés systematically given of all important works. The section on Shakespeare is executed throughout with

admirable thoroughness. The résumés are made with care and knowledge, and certainly provide the Wagners of literary study with something comfortably definite to carry home in their note-books; but it is a nice question whether the nature of the splendid October Eclogue, for instance, of The Shepherd's Calendar' is more fully conveyed to the reader by the dry information that it 'treats of the poetic art, which Cuddie praises as a divine gift, complaining, however, that it is no longer valued as of old, and especially lacks powerful patrons, than if the same number of words had been devoted to at least a hint of its impetuous eloquence, glowing imagery, and ringing verse. In such cases, however, the defect is only negative; and the merit of what is offered is, so far as it goes, unexceptionable. But we cannot acquit the historian of singular obtuseness or insufficiency in the passing judgments levelled at the minor stars whose 'contents' were not thought to merit tabulation. Donne is disposed of by the information that he is 'tumid and artificial.'

'He may be counted the last of the Euphuists. . . . His poems include, besides sacred ones, others that are extremely worldly. Of similar literary character were Richard Crashaw and Richard Lovelace.'

The obvious could not be more bluntly stated, nor the essential more completely missed. It is needless to multiply examples of this kind of conscientious futility. They culminate in the paragraph devoted to Bacon, who appears to owe his admission to this History chiefly to his being an indispensable party in the great ShakespeareBacon controversy, to which two large pages are devoted; his literary character is summed up in the single sentence, 'in all his works he appears very clever, but also very dry.'

It remains to notice, finally, the great collaborative enterprise of the Cambridge Press, the Elizabethan section of which, planned with imposing breadth, is now complete. Many schools of training are represented among the authors. The philological scholarship of America and Germany, the more insistently literary and philosophic criticism of Oxford, the private erudition of Vol. 216.-No. 431.

2 c

370

dilemma; whatever i been used

The sonnet

highly con panoply of

device, whi rhyme to effect. W potent an situation € its use? work and

cisely wha

recognises

grudging

their origi ship and French co but we d literary pi

It is &

literary h splendid from Ger our earlie

of Shake paint; an the task, appears t of the Ge by popul Intermed Engels a stands th Wülker. be briefl

from poi definite in critici résumés

The sect

4

than forest a union of imaginative insight grip comparable to that displayed in these

upreme interest of Elizabethan literature in its galaxy of great writers. Of their only fragments are, for the most part,

Their works are their only monuments. ned interpenetration of criticism and biointe-Beuve's sense, there is rarely an opening. s, the temper which he first brought into raiture is perceptible in several of the ially of the more evasive and enigmatic Fong others, Mr A. Symons's 'Middleton and Prof. Vaughan's 'Webster and Tourneur' highest rank of penetrating criticism and osition, widely as the writers differ in mental wint of view. And many other sections are scholarship at once sober and refined, which minatingly the accretions of phrase and t have gathered about most Elizabethan half-a-century of discussion not always on idolatry. Excellent in this way are Prof. th's judicious handling of Marlowe, a sufferer from that process; and Prof. lysis of the decadence' of Ford. In the reatest of Elizabethans a rare combination ualities was called for. Prof. Saintsbury's chapters are a tissue of lively and acute it they resemble rather a critical review of an a constructive appreciation; and the ays flavoured with personality and instinct on, are often too purely individual to find a ly in a work intended to represent, as far › critical and scholarly mind of this generahmen. But we would not close upon a note ent; and it is hardly a slur upon the most ry worker among the English scholars of iggest that his gifts fit him better to guide an to draw in the team, though the reins by 'Nous' himself.

C. H. HERFORD.

Art. 4.-CAVOUR AND THE MAKING OF ITALY.

1. The Life and Times of Cavour. By W. R. Thayer. Two vols. London: Constable, 1911.

2. The Dawn of Italian Independence. By W. R. Thayer. Two vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1893. 3. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic. Garibaldi and the Thousand. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy. By G. M. Trevelyan. London: Longmans, 1907-11. 4. Cavour. By Countess E. Martinengo-Cesaresco. London: Macmillan, 1898.

5. A History of Italian Unity. By Bolton King. Two vols. London: Nisbet, 1899.

6. Historical Essays and Studies. By Lord Acton. London: Macmillan, 1907.

7. Il Resorgimento Italiano. Conferenze. By Costanzo Rinaudo. Two vols. Turin: Olivero, 1910.

AMID a chorus of congratulation Italy celebrated, during the past year, the Jubilee of her resurrection' as a united nation. The sympathetic good-will evoked by this event is entirely intelligible. No other political movement of the nineteenth century touched the imagination of mankind in the same degree as the Italian Risorgimento. Owing partly, perhaps, to the romantic halo which hovers over everything Italian, partly to the heroic stature of the leading actors in the immediate drama, partly to the rising sentiment of nationality in Europe at large, the prolonged struggles of the Italian peoples for the attainment of independence and unity were watched with unusual sympathy in many a foreign land; but nowhere, it is safe to say, with so much enthusiasm as in our own country. The prevailing sentiment in England is faithfully reflected by Mr Lecky, & typical writer of the Victorian era:

'The mingled associations of a glorious past and of a noble present, the genuine and disinterested enthusiasm that so visibly pervaded the great mass of the Italian people, the genius of Cavour, the romantic character and career of Garibaldi, and the inexpressible charm and loveliness of the land which was now rising into the dignity of nationhood, all contributed to make the Italian movement unlike any other of our time. It was the one moment of nineteenth