Letters on Literature

Sixteen short essays cast as letters — a form Lang chose, his Preface explains, so he could write about a few literary subjects "with more freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graver kind of essay" — addressed to a cast of invented correspondents borrowed from other writers' fiction: Thackeray's Lady Violet Lebas, and "gifted Hopkins," the minor poet of Oliver Wendell Holmes's novel The Guardian Angel. Between them the letters range from modern poetry (Swinburne, William Morris, and the little-known Robert Bridges) to Fielding, Longfellow, a friend of Keats, Virgil, the medieval romance Aucassin and Nicolette, the philosophers Plotinus and Lucretius, La Rochefoucauld, two letters on the lighter verse form vers de société, Gérard de Nerval, and books about Native Americans — with a letter on Samuel Richardson contributed by a woman critic more often, Lang notes, his own critic than his collaborator.

First published as a series in the New York weekly The Independent, the letters were collected into a single volume in 1889.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete collection: all sixteen letters, both appendices, and Lang's own footnotes.