The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters on Literature, by Andrew Lang

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Title: Letters on Literature

Author: Andrew Lang

Release Date: May 13, 2005 [eBook #1395]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON LITERATURE***

Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

LETTERS ON LITERATURE
by Andrew Lang

Contents:

Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry
Of Modern English Poetry
Fielding
Longfellow
A Friend of Keats
On Virgil
Aucassin and Nicolette
Plotinus (A.D. 200-262)
Lucretius
To a Young American Book-Hunter
Rochefoucauld
Of Vers de Societe
On Vers de Societe
Richardson
Gerard de Nerval
On Books About Red Men
Appendix I
Appendix II

DEDICATION

Dear Mr. Way,

_After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture a short
one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him, and only
know him by his many kindnesses? Perhaps you will add another to these
by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a sort experimental in
English, and in prose, though Horace--in Latin and in verse--was
successful with it long ago_?

_Very sincerely yours_,

_A. LANG_.

_To W. J. Way_, _Esq_.
_Topeka_, _Kansas_.

PREFACE

These Letters were originally published in the _Independent_ of New York.
The idea of writing them occurred to the author after he had produced
"Letters to Dead Authors." That kind of Epistle was open to the
objection that nobody _would_ write so frankly to a correspondent about
his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be
attempted again. The _Lettres a Emilie sur la Mythologie_ are a well-
known model, but Emilie was not an imaginary correspondent. The persons
addressed here, on the other hand, are all people of fancy--the name of
Lady Violet Lebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray's: gifted Hopkins is
the minor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Guardian Angel." The
author's object has been to discuss a few literary topics with more
freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graver kind of
ess