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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. After this general survey, I propose to deal with one of Nicholas Rowe's plays. The result of my enquiry will best prove whether it was worth my while to examine the work of this minor dramatist. Criticism has been lavished on the men of genius: why should the less distinguished poets be passed over or dismissed with a sneer? If, therefore, I call attention to the shrouded figure of a half-forgotten poet, it is because this poet has generally been neglected by recent historians of English literature.1 Mr. Gosse, who in the preface to the first edition of his Seventeenth Century Studies evinces such a sympathetic interest in these smaller writers, in whom "the progress of literary history is most clearly to be marked", has in his History of Eighteenth Century Literature room for only two brief allusions to the translator of Boileau's, Lutrin and "the sentimental tragic poet Rowe".2 Professor Korting3 dismisses him with the following disdainful remark ? "N. Rowe ist bekannter durch seine Shakespeare-Ausgabe, als durch seine Dramen, welche iibrigens absolut wert- los sind". 1 I do not, of course, refer to bulkier works, such as Prof. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature. 8 As regards the translation of Boileau's Lutrin, I may be permitted to point out that Mr. Gosse errs in ascribing it to our poet; Rowe contributed Oiily a memoir of Boileau to a translation of the famous mock-heroic by J. Bell. Cf. Diet, of Nat. Biography. 1 Grundrissder Geschichte derenglischen Literatur,p. 297,par. 267. This is acute enough, to be sure, but with all respect due to the author of the Grundriss, I may not be blamed for assuming his verdict to be based upon second-hand information. Monsieur Beljame's book Le Public et les Hom- mes de Lettres en Angleterre au d...