Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/468

 464 Sherman worked nor in the literary credos with which it might be con- nected. . . . Emotionally the common bond was in general fulness of emotion rather than in the fact that this emotional richness was always of the same kind." The demonstration of a dominant literary movement between 1789 and 1830, a movement of ascertainable intellec- tual direction and definable emotional quality, does not depend upon our ability to prove that every notable writer of the period was at the centre of it. It depends rather upon our rising to a point from which the work of the period as a whole can be compared with what went before and after in England and with the work of other periods of intellectual curiosity and emotional fulness in other lands. From this point of view, to which, in his preoccupation with group influences and local environments, Professor Pierce allows us to repair but seldom, cross-currents, back-curents, and eddies dwindle into incidents in the course of the general, enthusiastic, revolutionary move- ment a movement foredoomed to failure towards a recon- ciliation of human with natural law. S. P. SHERMAN. University of Illinois. THE TRAGEDY OF TRAGEDIES. By Henry Fielding: Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by James T. Hillhouse, Ph.D. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918. 8 vo. $3.00. Fielding's dramatic burlesque upon scholarly editing has profited by the competent editorial scholarship of Mr. James T. Hillhouse in a volume recently issued from the Yale Univer- sity Press. The composition and stage history of the play Mr. Hillhouse traces in initial chapters, discussing the shorter version of 1730, Tom Thumb, and the elaborate version of 1731, The Tragedy of Tragedies, with its mock critical preface and annotations. In appendices he treats of the interpolation, The Battle of the Poets, a new act inserted late in 1730, a satire on Gibber sometimes attributed to Thomas Cooke; 1 and of the musical adaptations of the play. He adds to our knowledge of Eliza Haywood of romancing memory in the account of her version, The Opera of Operas (1731), to which John Frederick Lampe furnished the music; and brings the play close to our own day in the description of Kane O'Hara's Tom Thumb, A work of some merit C. Cross says this is "probably by Cooke," and considers it a nerit. (Hist, of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918) I, 956. 188-89.)