Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, son of a Sussex squire, was born in 1840, studied at Stonyhurst and Oscott, was for twelve years in the diplomatic service, and in 1877-81 made those travels in Arabia and the Moslem East of which the books on the Bedouins and on Nejd, by his wife, Lady Anne Blunt (daughter of Lord Lovelace), are a brilliant record. He was an equally enthusiastic supporter of the Nationalist movements in Egypt (under Arabi Pasha) and in Ireland, and was in Kilmainham for holding a meeting in a proclaimed district. His Love Sonnets of Proteus (1880) as poems are not always perfect in form, but are vital, personal, introspective, modern, accomplished; and besides printing his views on Islam and India, he has published In Vinculis (prison poems), Esther, The Stealing of the Mare (with Lady Anne), Griselda, and Satan Absolved, and some miscellaneous poems. A collection of his poetry was edited in 1898 by Mr Henley and Mr Wyndham. Frederic William Henry Myers (18431901), son of an Anglican clergyman (author of Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and other works), was born at Keswick, and educated at Cheltenham College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1864, and was made Fellow and classical lecturer in 1865. In 1872 he became a school inspector under the Education Department, an office held until the year before his death, which occurred at Rome. He wrote several volumes of poetry, the first of which was St Paul (1867); published a collection of Essays, Classical and Modern (1883), which shows fine critical insight; and contributed the monograph on Wordsworth to the series of 'English Men of Letters.' He was best known, however, as one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, and as joint-author of some of its publications, including Phantasms of the Living (1886); in his last work, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, he summed up what he accepted as the positive results of such researches. William Black (1841-98) was born in Glasgow, where he received his education, and studied art at a government school with the view of becoming a landscape-painter. Instead, however, he adopted journalism, having written for the Glasgow Weekly Citizen before his removal to London in 1864, the year in which he made his first-and wholly unsuccessful-effort in fiction, a story called James Merle. During the PrussoAustrian war of 1866 he proved his exceptional gifts as special war correspondent on the staff of the Morning Star; and in a novel, Love or Marriage (1868), he utilised some of his experiences. In Silk Attire (1869) and Kilmeny (1870) proved more successful than the previous work; but it was A Daughter of Heth (1871) that established his reputation with the novel-reading public. The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872) is founded on an actual driving excursion between London and Edinburgh, and obtained praise from Ruskin. A Princess of Thule (1873) is perhaps the best of all his many romances, with its vivid transcripts of Hebridean sunsets and scenery, its quaint Gaelic-English; above all, its exquisite heroine. Soon after this Black, who had been sub-editor of the Daily News for five years, gave up journalism for the career of a novelist; and amongst the Princess of Thule's many successors are Macleod of Dare (1878), which ends tragically; White Wings (1880); Shandon Bells (1882); Yolande (1883); Judith Shakespeare (1884), with WILLIAM BLACK. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry. Shakespeare himself for one of the characters; White Heather (1886); In Far Lochaber and The Strange Adventures of a House Boat (1888); Stand Fast, Craig Royston (1890); Highland Cousins (1894); and Wild Eelin (1898). He was more skilful in describing scenery and communicating its charm than in creating character or working out an inevitable plot. His popularity was great and well deserved, but can hardly be said to have outlived him. William Clark Russell, born of English parentage in New York in 1844, is the son of Henry Russell, the well-known singer and composer of 'A Life on the Ocean Wave' and other familiar melodies. Educated in England and France, he went to sea in the British merchant service at the age of thirteen, and served as a sailor for seven years. Afterwards he took to journalism, and finally to fiction, wherein he has turned his nautical experience to good account in a long series of breezy sea-stories beginning with John Holdsworth, Chief Mate (1874), and The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877), and continuing in An Ocean Tragedy (1890), The Convict Ship (1894), The Last Entry (1897), and The Ship's Adventure (1899). He has also reprinted some volumes of collected articles and papers, and written biographies of Nelson and Collingwood. Andrew Lang was born at Selkirk in 1844, and was educated at Edinburgh Academy, at St Andrews University, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a classical first-class, and was elected Fellow of Merton College in 1868. Choosing a literary career, or marked by literature for her own, he soon became one of the busiest as well as the brightest writers in the world of London journalism, and one of the most versatile and many-sided of English bookmen. He treats the most varied subjects with the same light, humorous touch, and he touches nothing which he does not adorn. He often expounds very serious and heart-felt convictions in a sprightly, airy, or even paradoxical manner, and in controversy contrives playfully to deal quick and deft and heavy strokes. He took a foremost part in the long debate with Professor Max Müller and his school about the interpretation of mythology and folk-tales, and it may safely be said that to his brilliant polemic fell most of the honours of the field. He was made LL.D. of St Andrews in 1885, and in 1888 was elected the first Gifford lecturer at that university. His poetical work included Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), Ballades in Blue China (1880), Helen of Troy (1882), Rhymes à la Mode (1884), Grass of Parnassus (1888; largely a new edition of Ballads and Lyrics), and Ballades of Books (1888). Critics professed to trace the influence of Rossetti and Swinburne in Mr Lang's poetry, but were willing to concede to him a wonderful power of uttering his own subtle imaginations in wellmarked cadences, in short, clear-ringing phrases. The Ballades of 1880 were among the first illustrations in English verse of the experiments in old French measures made in France by De Banville. The Ballades in Blue China are not without the qualities of serious poetry. The fairy poem, 'The Fortunate Isles,' amongst the 'ballads and verses vain' of the Rhymes à la Mode, is a beautiful and sustained effort of pure fantasy, controlled by a something deeper underlying it. Custom and Myth (1884) and Myth, Ritual, and Religion (2 vols. 1887) were at once recognised as solid contributions to the study of the philosophy and religion of primitive man, written with unusual directness and vigour, and lightened up by a wealth of felicitous illustration. Admirably clever and entertaining volumes, on subjects ranging from pure literature, from folklore and primitive religion, down to the byways of bibliographers and the gossip of the day, are The Library, In the Wrong Paradise, Books and Bookmen, Letters to Dead Authors, Letters on Literature, Lost Leaders, Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody—all issued between 1880 and 1890. He translated with exquisite skill Aucassin and Nicolette, produced the faultless edition of Perrault's Popular Tales, and selected the fairy-tales forming the Blue Fairy Book, the New Fairy Book, and other like collections. Cock Lane and Common Sense and The Book of Dreams and Ghosts illustrate his interest in occultism and his open mind on the problems of the 'sub-liminal' region. The Making of Religion and Magic and Religion, arising out of his appointment as Gifford lecturer at St Andrews, continued his researches and speculations on the deepest questions of life. The Monk of Fife was a notable novel, and his Life of J. G. Lockhart a still more notable biography. A less congenial piece of work was the life and letters of Lord Iddesleigh. If his history of St Andrews was a somewhat slight piece of work, his books on Prince Charles Edward, on Pickle the Spy, and on the Companions of Pickle were based largely on original documents. The Mystery of Mary Stuart has much of the fascination of its subject; and his History of Scotland from the Roman occupation (vols. i. and ii., 19001903) constitues an important-though not biassed-piece of historical work. A book on Tennyson is but one of many contributions to literary criticism. He himself translated Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, and the Homeric Hymns; shared (with Messrs Butcher, Leaf, and Myers) in exceptionally scholarly and graceful prose translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad, and edited the 'Border' Scott, the 'Gadshill' Dickens, and a selection from Burns; and has written for the Encyclopædia Britannica, for Chambers's Encyclopædia, and (on Ballads) for the present work. Ballade to Theocritus in Winter. Envoy. Master, when rain, and snow, and sleet un Twilight on Tweed. Three crests against the saffron sky, Wan water from the border hills, Like a loved ghost thy fabled flood Fleets through the dusky land; A mist of memory broods and floats, The air is full of ballad notes, Borne out of long ago. Old songs that sung themselves to me, Twilight, and Tweed, and Eildon Hill, You tell me that the voice is still That should have welcomed me. Robert Bridges, born in 1844 the son of a Kentish squire, studied at Eton and Corpus Christi, Oxford, qualified in medicine at Bartholomew's, and for some years practised in that and other London hospitals till 1882, when he retired. For a dozen years before that he had been known as a cultured and scholarly poet of indisputable and unique gifts; his lyrics give him a place apart from contemporaries, and some of them have a charm hardly equalled since the Elizabethan days. The Growth of Love, Prometheus the Fire-giver (1883), Eros and Psyche (1885), are amongst his nameworthy poems; and his plays include Nero (1885), Achilles in Scyros (1890), Palicio, Ulysses, The Christian Captives, The Humours of the Court, The Feast of Bacchus (1889). He has shown rare sympathy and insight as a critic in his essay on Keats; and by his examination of Milton's prosody and other studies on verse forms, he has shed much light on the mysteries and fascinations of the subtlest metrical rhythms and harmonies. Sometimes he seems to defy his own lessons; at times his verses are apparently written to illustrate his theories; and some of his experiments-such as the 'Peace Ode' in 1903, written so that if English were spelt as it is or should be pronounced, the syllables would scan according to the laws of Greek prosody'—must be pronounced scholarly, ingenious, and original rather than inspired, happy, or melodious. William Minto (1845-93), born near Alford in Aberdeenshire, was educated at Aberdeen and Merton, Oxford, and after editing the Examiner and doing other journalistic work in London, from 1880 was Professor of Logic and English at Aber deen. His Manual of English Prose Literature (1872) became a standard book; his Characteristics of the English Poets (1874) proved him a sympathetic critic; and he wrote the Defoe for the 'Men of Letters' series. His two novels (1886 and 1888) did not attract much notice. Alexander Anderson, born at Kirkconnel in Dumfriesshire in 1845, laboured for nearly twenty years as surfaceman on the railway near his native place, but found time to cherish his joy in poetry not merely by the diligent study of English and Scottish literature, but by reading the greater French, Italian, and German poets in their own tongues. He had published two collections of poems when in 1880 he was summoned to a post in the Library of the Edinburgh University; and there he has continued ever since, save during three years when he was secretary to the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh (1883-86). His bestknown volumes are Songs of the Rail (3rd ed. 1881) and Ballads and Sonnets (1879). He has contributed much verse to the magazines, and has printed (privately) a volume of translations from Heine. Though he has done justice to the poetry of the railway and of the railway-man's life, his themes embrace most of those that most nearly touch the human heart. Only part of his poems are written in the Scottish vernacular, the rest being in excellent nervous English. Sidney Colvin, born at Norwood in 1845, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has been Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge (1873-85), and Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. He has written much on art criticism for the magazines and reviews, issued a History of Engraving in England, published Lives of Landor and Keats, and edited Keats's letters and R. L. Stevenson's letters and the Edinburgh edition of his works. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, born at Southampton in 1845, was educated at King's College School, London, and Merton College, Oxford. In 1868-76 he was a schoolmaster at Manchester, Guernsey, and Elgin, but soon after established himself as one of the most active critics of the day; in 1895 he became Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh. All his work is characterised by fullness of knowledge, definiteness of judgment, wealth of illustrative allusion, and energy-if not grace-of style. He has been an active contributor to the greater magazines (of Macmillan's he was for some time editor) and to encyclopædias-this work contains four valuable articles by him. Amongst his works are two on the history of French literature; books on Dryden, Marlborough, Scott, and Matthew Arnold; essays on English literature and on French novelists; a volume of Corrected Impressions; a Short History of English Literature, besides histories of Elizabethan and of nineteenth-century literature; some of the little books on 'Periods of European Literature,' of all of which he is general editor; a book on the town of Manchester, and much miscellaneous work; editions of Scott's Dryden and of Sterne; and a great work on The History of Criticism from the Earliest Times to the Present, in three volumes. Alfred Perceval Graves, born in 1846 in the south of Ireland, thoroughly understands the southern peasant. His ballads are the work of a generation earlier than that of Mr Yeats, and they embody an earlier and very different-not on that account, perhaps, a less accurate-conception of Irish character; he may be said to belong to the school of Lever and Lover. His best-known song, 'Father O'Flynn,' is an admirable example of the school of Irish humour to which it belongshumour genuine and never coarse-April laughter, bright and wholesome, but with a tear of tenderness never far off. In other pieces-The White Blossom's off the Bog,' for instance-he has struck with a true touch the note of gentle pathos. Mr Graves's principal volumes are Songs of Killarney (1873), Irish Songs and Ballads (1880), and Father O'Flynn and other Irish Lyrics (1889). Several of his songs have been published with musical accompaniment arranged by Professor Villiers Stanford. William Schwenck Gilbert was the son of William Gilbert (1804-89), author of some thirty novels and tales, and was born in London in 1836. He graduated at London University, was a clerk in the Privy-Council Office from 1857 to 1862, and in 1864 was called to the Bar. From 1861 he had been contributing to the magazines, and he was erelong on the staff of Fun, in whose columns his Bab Ballads appeared. His burlesque Dulcamara (1866) was followed by a long series of comedies, burlesques, and operettas - the fairy comedies including The Palace of Truth (1870), Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), The Wicked World (1873), and Broken Hearts (1876). Other comedies are the charming Sweethearts (1874) and Engaged (1877), somewhat more cynical in tone; among his plays are also Charity (1874), Gretchen (1879), Comedy and Tragedy (1884), and an unsuccessful drama, Brantinghame Hall (1888). But the work with which his name is more especially identified is the characteristic genre of light, witty, humorous, paradoxical operettas, in which his sprightly and cleverly versified words and songs were wedded to the tuneful and taking music of Sir Arthur Sullivan. The 'Gilbert and Sullivan' productions, though not quite a new species, were a very considerable contribution to the dramatic art of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Though neither great nor profound either as literature or as art, they had in both elements real interest and value, and attracted and entertained large sections of the public who had no keen attachment to the classical drama or the 'legitimate' opera. Besides the preliminary experiments in this sort, Thespis (1871) and Trial by Jury, this wonderfully popular series comprised The Sorcerer (1877), H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1880), Patience (1881), Iolanthe (1882), Princess Ida (1883), The Mikado (1885), Ruddigore (1887), The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), The Gondoliers (1889), Utopia Limited (1893), and The Grand Duke (1896). In nearly all his better-known works Gilbert displays a fantastic humour that is often subtle, nearly always healthy in tone, and is only the more entertaining for a slight flavour of cynicism, which is seldomer seriously meant than set down in pure fun. On the other hand, the satire, though playfully put, is often real and effective. His touch is light, and the absurd earnestness with which his quaint conceits are worked out is inimitable, though it has constantly been imitated. In The Yeomen of the Guard he forsook the grotesque vein, and presented characters that are both human and pathetic. As seems appropriate in the case of one who claims to be of the blood of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Mr Gilbert's work was at least as popular in America as at home. Misunderstanding between Mr Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan led to a temporary breach in the brilliantly successful partnership of more than twenty years' standing, and for a time the collaborators worked apart; but Gilbert's libretto to His Excellency (1894), set to music by another composer, was found to lack an important element of its popularity. Even in the last joint works of the old partners it seemed as if the vein was largely exhausted, and even before Sullivan's death the series had come to an end. Much of Gilbert's verse shows supreme craftsmanship and mastery of rhymes and rhythms. Francis Cowley Burnand, born in 1836, was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, with a view to Anglican orders, but in 1858 became a Roman Catholic. He was called to the Bar in 1862, but the success of some early dramatic ventures altered his plans; and he has produced over a hundred and twenty pieces, chiefly light comedies and burlesques, including The Colonel and Cox and Box (to Sullivan's music). He had joined Mr H. J. Byron in starting Fun, but in 1863 left that paper for Punch, of which in 1880 he became editor. Amongst his own contributions to Punch were Happy Thoughts (1868), The Modern Sandford and Merton (1872), and Strapmore, by 'Weeder' (1878). My Time and what I've done with it (1874) was followed in 1903 by a more considerable autobiographical Reminiscences. George Robert Sims was born in London in 1847, and was educated there and at Bonn. Having joined the staff of Fun in 1874, he soon commenced his 'Dagonet' ballads and other contributions to the Referee. Among his plays are Crutch and Toothpick (1879), Mother-in-law (1881), The Lights & London (1881), The Romany Rye (1882), and, written in collaboration, In the Ranks, Harbour Lights, The Golden Ladder, Little Chris topher Columbus, The Gipsy Earl, The Gay City, and Scarlet Sin. His novels include Rogues and Vagabonds, Memoirs of Mary Jane, Mary Jane Married, Memoirs of a Landlady, and The Ten Commandments. His Daily News letters on the housing of the London poor were effective work in a very different category. Sydney Grundy, the son of a Manchester mayor, was born in 1848, educated at Owens College, and called to the Bar in 1869. He practised as a barrister for seven years, and had meanwhile made his first literary and dramatic ventures, including a novel in 1876. His first dozen plays were mainly adaptations from the French: A White Lie and A Fool's Paradise (both in 1889) were on similar lines, but original in substance; and his art was developed in a long series of plays, of which Sowing the Wind (1893), The New Woman (1894), The Greatest of These (1895), A Marriage of Convenience, The Black Tulip, and A Debt of Honour have been amongst the most entertaining and successsful. His Henry Arthur Jones, the son of a Buckinghamshire farmer, was born at Grandborough in 1851, was educated in the county, and from thirteen to twenty-seven was engaged in business. first nameworthy play, A Clerical Error, was produced in 1879; his first hit was The Silver King (1882). He passed from melodrama in Saints and Sinners (1884) to serious criticism of modern country life; and this was followed by The Middleman (1889), The Dancing Girl (1891), and The Crusaders, showing greater depth and maturity. Of more than a score of plays produced by him-many of them with a piquant element of social satire-some of the most notable were The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), Michael and his Lost Angel (1896), The Liars (1897), The Manœuvres of Jane (1898), and Mrs Dane's Defence (1900). Arthur Wing Pinero, the son of a London solicitor, was born in 1855, and bred at private schools with a view to his father's profession; but in 1874 made his début on the stage at Edinburgh, in 1875 joined the Lyceum company, and continued an actor till 1881. The player had ere then made himself known as a promising playwright, his earlier pieces including £200 a Year (1877) and The Squire (1881). His farces The Magistrate, The Schoolmistress, and Dandy Dick proved him a genial humourist ; Sweet Lavender (1888) was a sentimental drama. The Profligate was a new departure; The Weaker Sex, Lady Bountiful, and one or two others are also 'modern' and real. But it was in The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) that Mr Pinero produced a play that marked an epoch in the history of modern English drama; and the serious problems of modern social life were the keynotes of those that followed-The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895), The Benefit of the Doubt, Trelawny of the Wells, The Princess and the Butterfly (1897), The Gay Lord Quex (1899), Iris (1901), and Letty (1903). William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) was born at Gloucester and educated at the Crypt Grammar School there. While lying in hospital at Edinburgh he was visited by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the two became intimate for years, collaborating especially in a series of plays, Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin, Admiral Guinea, and Robert Macaire. Henley edited The Magazine of Art, The Scots (later National) Observer, The New Review, and other serials; two or three anthologies of lyrics; an edition of Burns (with Mr T. E. Henderson) and one volume of an edition of Byron; part of a Shakespeare, and the Tudor Translations;' and republished in volumes Views and Reviews on literary and artistic subjects. With Mr Farmer, he worked on a great dictionary of slang, practically completed at his death. His poetry is vigorous and vivid in expression and rapid in movement; shows a fondness for unrhymed lyrical measures and experiments in unusual rhythms, for odd words and curious locutions; and is lacking chiefly in simplicity and grace. The 'Hospital Rhymes' in the first Book of Verses (1888; 4th ed. 1893) are full of the grimmest realism, whereas the 'Bric-a-brac' series are largely exercitations in artificial verse forms. The London Voluntaries, published with the Song of the Sword (1892), had more of true poetry in them, of music and magic. A collected edition of his poems appeared in 1898; but For England's Sake (1900) and Hawthorn and Lavender (1901) were later volumes. All his work, prose and verse, reflects his virile temperament; his 'unconquerable soul' had to contend against physical disabilities and broken health. His best poems were short; in much of his verse there were rough, even coarse, passages; and he could celebrate the speed of the motor-car in a poem which is as little a thing of beauty as the vehicle itself. Yet some of his poems, and parts of many, were exquisite; at times he heard the voice of strange command': Out of the sound of the ebb and flow, It calls you where the good winds blow, It calls you, calls you night and day, In criticism he was confident, aggressive, full of prejudices, anti-conventional in his judgments, arrogant and contemptuous but stimulating, pungent, and trenchant in style. He commanded an exceptional wealth of epigram and dealt largely in inexplicit allusions; and his intolerance of dullness led to eccentricity and paradox. He strenuously maintained Byron's claim to be regarded as the great English poet of the nineteenth century. His long essay on Burns prefixed to the edition of the works by him and Mr Henderson aggrieved worshippers of the bard by insisting overmuch that Burns was 'a lewd peasant of genius' who completed rather |