a less expensive edition. The only drawback at present to its popularity as a classical handbook of reference is a price which puts it above the means of those who need it most. GRETTON, NEAR KETTERING. A. HAMILTON THOMPSON, A Bibliography of Thomas Gray. By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1917. 8vo. xiii + 296 pp. In a letter to Horace Walpole written from Cambridge on Feb. 25, 1768, in answer to an enquiry as to a new edition of his Poems (which was published by Dodsley in July of that year) Gray explains that the Long Story was to be omitted, and that to supply the place of it in bulk, lest my works should be mistaken for the works of a flea, or a pismire1' he had undertaken to send the publisher 'an equal weight of poetry or prose,' amounting to about two ounces of stuff'-' and with all this,' he adds, 'I shall be but a shrimp of an author.' In view of this slender bulk of Gray's literary output it was with no little surprise that we found Professor Northup's Bibliography to consist of an 8vo volume of more than three hundred pages, in which the separate items described exceed two thousand. The explanation is to be found in the fact that the author's scheme aimed at the compilation not only of a complete record of the editions of Gray's works, but also of a list of all the reviews, critical notices, and studies relating to him that had appeared down to the beginning of 1917, the year of publication., That any single individual should achieve finality in the execution of such a comprehensive scheme is hardly to be expected; but Professor Northup may fairly claim to have registered everything of real importance. The Elegy alone accounts for about 650 items, comprising some 250 editions; more than 130 translations into fifteen different languages, including Armenian, Bohemian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Russian, and Japanese; and upwards of 150 parodies and imitations. The earliest parody (by John Duncombe) appeared in 1753, two years after the first publication of the poem, and oddly enough it was published by the same publisher (Dodsley), in the same format, and at the same price (6d.) as the original. Among the parodies are elegies on a quid of tobacco' (1799), ' on a pair of breeches thrown upon a dunghill by a miser' (1818), ' on an old pipe-box' (1874), and on a favourite washerwoman' (1882). Of the translations the largest number (over forty) are in Latin; French comes second, with close on forty; and Italian third, with a couple of dozen. Latin was first in the field (1762), with a composite rendering into elegiacs, published at Cambridge, by Christopher Anstey, the author four years later of the famous New Bath Guide, and W. H. Roberts, Fellow of King's. French came next, headed by the version (1765) of Madame Necker, the heroine, as Susanne Curchod, of Gibbon's early romance, who had 1 Curiously enough the New English Dictionary has no eighteenth century instance of this word in its ordinary sense as here used by Gray. renewed relations with her in Paris in that very year. The earliest Italian translation did not appear until 1772, the year after Gray's death. Anstey's version brought him an interesting letter from Gray, which is not included. in the collected editions of Gosse or of Tovey, but is duly registered by Professor Northup, in another section of his volume, as having been printed in the introduction to the 1808 edition of Anstey's works-a characteristic instance of Professor Northup's thoroughness, which may serve to indicate, not only the care with which the work has been compiled, but also the general utility and interest of this Bibliography to the student of Gray. We have noticed an occasional slip or misprint; e.g. 'reprinted' for reproduced,' in No. 687; Italian' for Latin,' in No. 820; 'ara' for 'aera,' in No. 848; 'linci' for 'lirici,' in No. 1491; and Asheton' for Ashton,' on p. 250. Among minor omissions may be mentioned FitzThomas's vindication of Gray from the strictures of Dr Johnson, which is referred to by Miss Anna Seward in her letter to FitzThomas of July 9, 1788; and several letters by the present writer to The Times, the indexes of which do not seem to have been methodically laid under contribution. In the interests of completeness the references to the latter may be given here, viz., ‘Original MSS. of Gray's Elegy' (Dec. 12, 1913); Gray and Walpole: the Pseudonym Celadon' (March 9, 1914); 'Gray and Walpole: an Unfounded Inference' (March 23, 1914); 'Horace Walpole and Mrs G.' (April 13, 1914); and 'A Misprint in Gray' (April 22, 1915). The statement, reproduced (under No. 1533) from Dibdin's Bibliomania, that six copies only of Garrick's lines to Gray on his Odes were printed at Strawberry Hill, might have been corrected in the light of the reference (duly given by Professor Northup) to the question in The Correspondence of Gray, Walpole, West and Ashton (vol.11, pp. 174-5), where it is pointed out, on the authority of Horace Walpole's own (as yet unpublished) MS. Journal of the Printing-Office at Strawberry Hill, that the number of copies printed was not six only, but at least sixty. With regard to another statement, reproduced (under No. 2002) from the introduction to the third volume of Tovey's Letters of Thomas Gray (but without the reference), to the effect that an early correspondence of Gray's which is said to throw light upon his difference with Walpole was at one time in the possession of Messrs Quaritch, it may be mentioned here that the present writer was informed recently by Messrs Quaritch that this statement appears to have been made under a misapprehension. Professor Northup makes an interesting correction (under No. 473) with regard to Gray's translation of the Ugolino episode from Inferno XXXIII, which Mr Gosse claims to have printed for the first time in his Works of Thomas Gray in 1884 (see vol. 1, pp. xvi, 157), but which the Bibliography records to have been printed in part as long before as 1849 in the Gentleman's Magazine. The volume, which is admirably planned and arranged, and is provided with a useful (though by no means exhaustive) 1 Since this review was written a Canadian correspondent has pointed out in The Times Literary Supplement for April 18 that Mr Northup has failed to record several Spanish translations of the Elegy. index, is inscribed in a graceful dedication to the President of Magdalen, whose 'studia in Graium poetam impensa' are well known to every student and lover of Gray. FIVEWAYS, BURNHAM, BUCKS. PAGET TOYNBEE. Bibliography of Johnson. By WILLIAM PRIDEAUX COURTNEY. Revised and seen through the Press by DAVID NICHOL SMITH. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1915. 1915. 8vo. viii+186 pp. Mr W. P. Courtney's Bibliography of Samuel Johnson, which forms a volume in the series of Oxford Historical and Literary Studies issued under the direction of Professors Firth and Sir Walter Raleigh, is a posthumous publication, the MS. having been sent to press only a few weeks before the author's death. The proofs have been read, and the work revised, and where desirable supplemented, by Mr D. Nichol Smith, himself a Johnsonian of repute. The title of the work is something of a misnomer, and hardly does justice to the contents; for though the object of the book, as stated in the preface, is to give a record of the publication of Johnson's writings and compositions, it is apparent at a glance that it is a good deal more than a mere list of editions, the bibliography being so treated as to present the main facts of Johnson's literary career in the form of a series of interesting causeries, in which is incorporated not only matter that has hitherto been more or less inaccessible, but also much that is new. The article on The Rambler, for instance, runs to ten pages, of which not more than two or three are bibliographical in the strict sense of the word; that on the Lives of the Poets runs to more than twenty; and the article, of great interest, on The Dictionary exceeds thirty pages. A propos of The Rambler Mr Courtney records how Ruskin's father used to take with him on his foreign journeys 'four little volumes of Johnson-The Idler and The Rambler-as containing 'more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable compass'; anyhow the volumes were read and re-read in spare hours and on wet days, until, as Ruskin confesses in Praeterita, he became impregnated with their style, which dominated him for some years. In the causerie on the Dictionary it is related of Browning that, when he had decided to adopt literature as a profession, he qualified himself for it by reading and digesting the whole of Johnson's Dictionary-a performance which suggests a query as to what Johnson, who would not even admit such a word as 'civilization' into his Dictionary, would have thought of some of Browning's verbal coinages. In connection with Lauder's fraudulent attempts to convict Milton of plagiarism, Mr Courtney mentions a curious instance of Johnson's inconsistency; namely, that in spite of his avowed detestation of Milton's political principles, and of his 'infamous and false attack on his fame and character' in the Lives of the Poets-treatment which goaded the mild Cowper into exclaiming: 'Oh! I could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket!'-he yet carefully preserved a lock of Milton's hair, a lock which had once belonged to Addison, and which subsequently passed into the possession of Leigh Hunt, by whom it was given to Browning. A particularly valuable and interesting feature of Mr Courtney's notes is the information given as to the present whereabouts of notable copies of Johnson's works. Thus we learn that Burke's copy of the Dictionary, with MS. notes, is in the British Museum; that Johnson's corrected copy of the fourth edition (1773) of the same work, once the property of Sir Joshua Reynolds, passed into the library of Lord Spencer at Althorp, and thence with the rest of his collection to the John Rylands Library at Manchester; that Malone's copy of the Dublin 1775 edition, with MS. memoranda, and more than a thousand MS. remarks and observations, is in the British Museum; that the Bodleian possesses a copy of Williams's Longitude at Sea (written by Johnson), presented by Johnson, with MS. notes by him; that a special reprint of three articles contributed by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the Idler, presented to the writer by Johnson, and subsequently by Reynolds to Malone, passed at the death of its late owner, Mr C. E. Doble, into the hands of the editor of this Bibliography; that Pembroke College, Oxford, possesses a presentation copy from its former alumnus of his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, as well as Johnson's presentation copy to Sir Joshua Reynolds of his Political Tracts (1776), and the original MS. of his Prayers and Meditations; and so on. Unfortunately the index, which appears to be confined to the strictly bibliographical portions of the work, affords no clue. to the whereabouts in the volume of this information, some of which is of the highest interest and importance from the point of view of the Johnsonian. It should be noted in conclusion that Professor Bensly's name is misspelt on page 48; and that the author of London Lyrics, whose great-grandfather communicated to Johnson a collection of examples from Tillotson made by Addison with a view to the compilation of an English Dictionary, did not take the name of 'Locker-Sampson (p. 134). FIVEWAYS, BURNHAM, BUCKS. PAGET TOYNBEE. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. By DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. The Knickerbocker Press. 1917. 8vo. vii +329 pp. There are few, none perhaps save the extremest Sadducee and sceptic, who will deny that the supernatural and the macabre form one of the most fascinating realms of fiction. The appeal is universal, and Lafcadio Hearn went so far as to say that 'there is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in his treatment of the supernatural.' Nor is there any exaggeration in his words. We are nothing surprised then to find Miss Scarborough at the very outset emphasizing the difficulties of her task owing to the enormous mass of material with which she was bound to deal. She very aptly opens her study with a chapter on 'The Gothic Romance,' and here takes occasion to observe that the terror novel proper is generally conceded to begin with [Horace Walpole's] Romantic curiosity The Castle of Otranto.' Walpole's pinchbeck mediaevalism has doubtless come to be an acknowledged landmark of literary history, and it serves this purpose conveniently enough, but none the less it is to be wished that Leland's Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, ‘a romance of feudal times,' which preceded Otranto by two years, were not so entirely forgotten. Even Miss Scarborough has no mention of the earlier book, which in her pages assuredly deserves some recognition, however slight. It is obvious that although the supernatural-the word is used in its broadest sense-as expressed and treated in modern English fiction is the main theme of this study, it was necessary for the writer to trace in some measure the 'terror and blood' which had such vogue in our drama, and hence so marked an influence on the development of the novel. Nor can the tradition of the macabre, as it appears in Latin and Greek classics and in modern literatures other than our own, be wholly ignored, and as link is added to link a stupendous library has to be consulted, an almost incalculable number of volumes examined, for description and citation. Miss Scarborough promises a bibliography which is to comprise over three thousand titles, and which cannot fail to be of permanent value and importance. She has already brought together such an accumulated quantity of material and in this present study discussed so many romances, short stories, chapters, and even episodes that with her copious and painstaking industry it is all the more surprising to note the omission of works which surely rank among the masterpieces of modern macabre fiction. Thus she does not refer to the series of ghost stories from the erudite pen of the Provost of King's, two volumes which have pages so vivid in their description of malignant entities and sinister intelligences, that, when the first tale, Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book, appeared some years ago in The National Review, people were asking if it were not really true, and it was with something like relief we learned that Dr James had invented his midnight demon of the pit. Dr James is of great importance in a study of the supernatural in fiction, and this not only because his stories are consummate masterpieces, but because in his preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary he gives us his ideas how a ghost story ought to be laid out if it is to be effective,' and very striking and suggestive these ideas are. He has moreover initiated a certain school of ghost story. Such a book as E. G. Swain's The Stoneground Ghost Tales patently aud avowedly owes its inspiration to his genius. Miss Scarborough again has no mention of Mrs Nesbit's sombre little collection, Grim Tales, one of the stories in which for sheer gruesome horror it would be hard to beat. Vernon Lee's Hauntings, four weirdly fantastic studies of extraordinary power and great literary beauty in a scholarly setting, cannot be forgotten, and Lucas Malet's |