Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/75

 Lounsbury 487 "classical" opponents of his practice, who, while they lamented his want of art, admitted that they were pleased by his wildness and nature. With the volume on Voltaire the field of contro- versy becomes international: Voltaire's exile and return; his initial appreciation of Shakespeare and later recoil from its revolutionary consequences ; his belief in the dangers of a bar- baric romanticism; his wrath at Letoumeur; his controversial relations with Kames, Walpole, Johnson, and Garrick, and the retroactive effect upon his own reputation in England; finally the persistence of his authority as literary arbiter upon the Continent even to the day of Goetz von Berlichingen, when the Mede was at the gate and the handwriting clear upon the wall. The third volume centres upon Pope's and Theobald's editions of Shakespeare ; the meannesses of Pope and the significance of the first version of the Dunciad as a piece of Shakespearean controversy; Bentley's emendations of Paradise Lost and the discredit they brought upon all verbal criticism, including the prospective criticism of Theobald — the history, in a word, of the means by which one of the ablest of all the editors of Shake- speare has been pilloried for posterity as "piddling Tibbald." It will be seen that compared with the Studies in Chaucer the Shakespearean Wars occupied a much smaller portion of a much larger field; that even this portion had been cultivated before, though never so intensively ; that, of course, it was need- less to do for Shakespeare what the earlier studies had done for Chaucer; and that for all these reasons the later studies are distinctly less important than the earlier. The same remark applies to Lounsbury's still later works on usage- — in diction, in spelling, and in pronunciation, where his diffuseness has come dangerously near prolixity; and to his studies of Tenny- son and of Browning, interesting and appreciative though these are. Lounsbury will, it is safe to say, be remembered partly as a scholar who elucidated the attitude of the eighteenth century toward Shakespeare, but chiefly as the scholar whose book made Chaucer a reality beyond the circle of specialists. It would be an agreeable task to treat in detail the American writers upon art, and to determine whether any definite ten- dency underHes the work of WilUam Dunlap, Washington All- ston, William Wetmore Story, Henry Theodore Tuckerman, W. J. Stillman, and the rest. It will be possible, however, to treat