Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/414

 400 RECENT FRENCH LITERATURE. in the air, books are neither written nor read. Doubtless, if the war, as is feared, be a protrafted one, things will in some measure right themselves. In this connexion I may perhaps recall to my readers the fa6t that we were engaged in a European war, with a very short period of peace, from 1793 to 1815, and that some of our greatest modern literature, poetry and prose, appeared during those years. To take only the great names, Wordsworth and Coleridge produced their finest work between those dates ; Walter Scott all his poems and the novel of Waverley ; Southey his long poems and the ' Life of Nelson ' ; Campbell the volume of 'Poems' (1805), containing the finest war songs in the English language; Byron the first two cantos of ' Childe Harold ' ; and Jane Austen, ' Sense and Sensibility/ ' Pride and Pre- judice,' and ' Northanger Abbey.' The list might easily be extended, but there is sufficient matter to afford hope for the present and future. People will presently begin once more to read, if only to distracl their minds from the terrors of war. Novels will probably be chiefly sought, but history might be read with interest and profit. A mere cursory study of history would prevent the state-
 * OR the moment, while battles hurtle