The Express.
London, England, 1849-01-18 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Outlaws of Enyl44 Literature. By Tnostas B. &taw,
8.A., Professor of English Literature in the Imperial
Alexander Lyceum of St. Petersburg. London, 1819.
Of all the achievements of the English people, their
literature is the one of which, everything considered,
they have most reason to be vain. And yet, how
much soever they may prize and cherish it at home it
is, perhaps, the one whose triumphs abroad they re-
gard with the greatest indifference. For we are a
proud rather than a vain people. Our love of approba-
tion is less largely developed than our self-will and
self-esteem. We care more for power than for eclat,
and mo long as we retain a firm grasp of the material
mainsprings by which the world is moved, the extent
of our purely spiritual influence will be of very little
moment to us. The piles of English goods displayed
in a foreign warehouse, the bristling of English can-
non on a Spanish or Italian rock, the puffing of an
English locomotive along a French or German rail-
way, are more flattering to the self-love of ninety-
nine out of a hundred Englishmen than the greatest
of the recorded triumphs which the literature of their
country has won in every part of Europe.
Entirely in accordance with the nonchalance with
which we regard our literary reputation abroad, was
the non-existence in our language of any complete
and connected history of our vernacular literature,
either on an extended or a limited scale. Wanton
and Disraeli, than whom no men were ever better
qualified for the task, commenced their work too late
in life to have had any reasonable prospect of com-
pleting it. With the exception of the noble frag-
ments of literary history which they have left us,
and the chapters in Mr. Hallam's work, in which he
treats of English writers, our literature contained
until very recently not a single work, good, bad, or
indifferent, to which either the curious foreigner,
or the inquisitive student at home, coed be re-
ferred for guidance and information. Of "ele-
gant extracts " and " specimens," and bril-
liant detached criticisms there were enough and to
spare. But a clear and comprehensive introduction
to Ecglish literature was a work which no order of
English intellect had felt called on to produce. Al-
most the first definite attempt to supply this want is
the volume now before us; and it is altogether cha-
racteristic of the national peculiarities to which we
have alluded—that its production was reserved for a
professor of English literature in the metropolis of
Russia.

Mr. Shaw's success in a path hitherto nntrodden
is highly creditable to him. His book is not
only excellent as a first attempt in this direc-
tion, but even after his example has met with
many imitators, may yet retain its rank as a
brief and impressive view of the glories of our
national literature. Doubtless Mr. Shaw had no
ordinary resources to draw upon. The richest mate-
rials lay matte red at his feet, in the immense quantity
of desultory criticism which has been published
during the l'Ast forty years. Next to romantic poetry
and his* tor'acal fiction, criticism was the sphere in
which du, most remarkable writers of the generation
now parsing away, most successfully developed their
extraordinary powers. The spirit of the age was
pre-e, inently critical ; with this disadvantage net..
Was, that it was too much a time of transition fur
the great mass of the criticisms produced to have any
fled and abiding value as criticism, though, as essays
and biographical sketches, some of the writinge alluded