"Historical Outlines of English Accidence" of the late Richard Morris. While in England he came into contact with the members of the Fabian Society, more particularly with William Archer and Graham Wallas, and his interest in English literature assumed a new direction through acquaintance with the social currents and the tendencies of English life. Doctor Kellner revisited England regularly during the following years, widening the circle of his British friends and laying the foundation of his work on English literature, which was published in 1909 at Leipzig, under the title of "Die Englische Literatur im Zeitalter der Königin Viktoria." It is a study of great value, and particularly happy in its descriptions of the principal intellectual movements that gave the Victorian age its peculiar significance. The chapters on John Stuart Mill and the Utilitarians, on John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement, on George Eliot, Ruskin, and Carlyle, written in a style of great animation, as well as his account of the hundreds of minor writers mentioned, if only by slight touches, bear testimony to the writer's intimate knowledge of his subject. It was easy to discern in the occasional references to Emerson, Holmes, Poe, etc., that interest in American literature of which the present volume is the result. Within the last few years Professor Kellner has returned to a favorite subject of his early years the textual study of Shakespeare in both the quartos and folios. By his close scrutiny of Elizabethan manuscripts in the London Record office and in the British Museum he has acquired a rare palæographic knowledge of Shakespeare's time, and it may be confidently expected that his emendations and conjectures concerning the poet's text, to be published under the auspices of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, will prove an unusually valuable addition to Shakespeare literature. New York, April 13, 1915. GUSTAV POLLAK. |