Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/514

 90 LITEEATURE. [m

of comments on the literature of the time by two of its most gifted minds would perish. But they are of the most intimate character, the unrestrained outpouring of two impassioned natures whose poetic and spiritual affection grew warmer as the obstacles to their union in- creased. Public opinion was much divided on the question whether or not they should ever have seen the light, but no one could deny the intense interest, both literary and personal, of the whole correspondence. The other chief book of the year of this class is The letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends (Methuen), edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin. They are addressed to many well-known literary men — Mr. Henley, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Barrie, Mr. Colvin himself, and others, and are full of keen interest in the writer's own literary work, but equally full of comments, incisive and sympathetic, on the literary work of others ; and these, often expressed with buoyant fancy and racy humour and always with the literary grace peculiar to Stevenson, make a most valuable addition to the series of his writings. Mr. Colvin, in an introduction, gives an admirable estimate of Stevenson's personal character. The third volume of The Works of Ziord Byron (Murray), edited by Mr. Rowland E. Prothero, contains a large number of hitherto unpublished letters written during the most critical period of the poet's life— that, namely, which covered his marriage to Miss Milbanke and his separation from her. Other collections of letters of more or less interest published for the first time, at any rate in book form, last year were Unpublished letters of Swift (Unwin), addressed by the dean to his friend Knightley Chetwode in 1714-1731, and now edited by Dr. Birkbeck Hill, which do not add much to what is already known of Swift ; letters of Thomas Oarlyle to His Youngest Sister (Chapman & Hall), edited by Mr. C. T. Copland, which show, more than anything else Carlyle wrote, the sympathetic and affectionate side of his character ; John Hookham Were and His Friends (Nisbet), edited by Miss Gabrielle Festing, containing intimate letters—many of them from George Canning — addressed to that diplomatist and scholar between the years 1799 and 1846, full of the social and political gossip of the time ; George Selwyn, His Letters and His Life (Unwin), edited by G. S. Roscoe and Helen Clerque, giving much of the same kind of gossip about the generation previous to Frere's, and first brought to light through the labour of the Historical Manuscripts Commission ; letters of 'Walter Savage Lander (Duckworth), edited by Stephen Wheeler — mainly private letters written by Landor as an old man to the daughter of an old friend, Miss Rose Paynter, afterwards Lady Graves- Sawle ; and The Xarly Harried Life of Maria Josephs Lady Stanley (Longmans;, edited by Miss Adeane. This last is a sequel to the "Girlhood of Maria Josepha Holroyd," by the same editor, and contains letters written by Lady Stanley up to 1820 — she did not die until 1862 — some letters of her aunt Sarah Martha Holroyd, and parts of a diary kept by Sir John Stanley. The letters are full of acute and vivacious comments upon public men and events.