sition, his position would have been
less disputable than it became when he added his negative assertion. It
is not quite true that the history of a literature is the history of a
people; still further from the truth is it that literary history which
is not the history of a people is worthless. It might be easily shown
that some of the very greatest literary productions known to the world
have very slight relations, or none at all, to the condition of the
society in which they were written. What, for example, is there in
Shakespeare's plays, or in Sir Walter Scott's poems and novels, which
is a manifestation of the spirit of their time? Scott, Wordsworth,
Byron, and Moore were strictly contemporaries. What could be more
unlike than their poems in spirit or in substance? What one trait have
they in common? The theory in question is an example of the tendency of
men to over generalization of particular facts, and of a like tendency
to over subtlety in critical philosophy.

The spirit of a people is, however, undeniably manifest in the writings
of its best and most favored authors; and to trace the rise of that
spirit and the gradual formation of a national or popular character is
a legitimate and a very instructive part of the task of a critic who
undertakes to present a full appreciation of a national literature.

Mr. Van Laun certainly begins at the beginning. He shows us what the
French people are; how the French nation arose and gradually grew into
an individual existence; and he thus imitates and emulates the
distinguished French critic whose work he has translated. M. Taine is
strong on the manifestation of Anglo-Saxonism in English literature,
and even finds the results of English beef and beer, and of the very
rain and fog of England, in the books of English writers.

Mr. Van Laun's theory of the origin of the French people is not a very
clear one; not even in his own mind, it would seem. He starts with the
assertion, in very positive terms, that the Iberians were the vanguard
of the invading races who overwhelmed and swept before them the oldest
known inhabitants of Western Europe--the Celts; and his language
implies that the former were and the latter were not an Indo-European
race; that the vanguard of the Indo-European invaders _found_ the Celts
in Europe and overcame them. But there is no doubt, we believe, that
the Celts themselves were, or are, an Indo-European race, and that they
are the oldest represent