He has a good head,
and it cannot be said that he ever allows an author to go to it. But the
authors whom he has collected in his wonderful cellar unquestionably make
him merry. In his books he always seems to be pressing on us "another
glass of Jane Austen," or "just a thimbleful of Pope," or "a drop of '42
Tennyson." No other critic of literature writes with the garrulous gusto
of a boon-companion as Mr. Saintsbury does. In our youth, when we demand
style as well as gusto, we condemn him on account of his atrocious
English. As we grow older, we think of his English merely as a rather
eccentric sort of coat, and we begin to recognize that geniality such as
his is a part of critical genius. True, he is not over-genial to new
authors. He regards them as he might 1916 claret. Perhaps he is right.
Authors undoubtedly get mellower with age. Even great poetry is, we are
told, a little crude to the taste till it has stood for a few seasons.

Mr. Gosse is at once more grave and more deferential in his treatment of
great authors. One cannot imagine Mr. Saintsbury speaking in a hushed
voice before Shakespeare himself. One can almost hear him saying, "Hullo,
Shakespeare!" To Mr. Gosse, however, literature is an almost sacred
subject. He glows in its presence. He is more lyrical than Mr. Saintsbury,
more imaginative and more eloquent. His short history of English
literature is a book that fills a young head with enthusiasm. He writes as
a servant of the great tradition. He is a Whig, where Mr. Saintsbury is an
heretical old Jacobite. He is, however, saved from a professorial
earnestness by his sharp talent for portraiture. Mr. Gosse's judgments may
or may not last: his portraits certainly will. It is to be hoped that he
will one day write his reminiscences. Such a book would, we feel sure, be
among the great books of portraiture in the history of English literature.
He has already set Patmore and Swinburne before us in comic reality, and
who can forget the grotesque figure of Hans Andersen, sketched in a few
lines though it is, in _Two Visits to Denmark_? It may be replied that Mr.
Gosse has already given us the best of his reminiscences in half a dozen
books of essay and biography. Even so, there were probably many things
which it was not expedient to tell ten or twenty years ago, but which
might well be related for the sake of truth and entertainment to-day. Mr.
Gosse in the past has usually told the truth about authors with the