Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from The Literary Digest, Volume 7:
SINCE Mr. Lowell's death, a small volume has been published entitled, "The Old English Dramatists," consisting of the notes he prepared for six lectures delivered during the spring of 1887, at the Lowell Institute, in Boston. In the delivery, these notes, it appears, were supplemented by a good deal of extemporaneous matter," suggested by the passages from the plays selected for illustrations of the discourse." This extemporaneous matter has not been preserved. The six lectures are devoted to Marlowe, Webster, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Ford. Notwithstanding the somewhat fragmentary nature of its contents, the volume has been very well received. Mr. W. H. Johnson, in The Denison Quarterly (Granville, Ohio), says of the Lectures:
"They will be searched in vain for any hint of the approaching dissolution of his powers. The same keen insight, the same flow of humor, the same love of the beautiful and good, and the same hatred of the wrong which have marked his whole career, are here in the fullness of their development. Posthumous publications are not, as a rule, fortunate, but the fame of Lowell can suffer no ill from the perusal of these lectures."
In a laudatory notice of the book, The Examiner (New York) thus describes its nature:
"The method followed in discussing these writers is conspicuously informal. No attempt is made to exhaust the subject, or to be scientific, or to develop a theory, except it be the theory that what is once beautiful is always so. There is something of Lamb's delightful diffuseness in these talks, and certainly Lowell's motive in speaking his mind was identical with Lamb's-a sincere love of his theme, and long familiarity with it." The book seems to be not less acceptable on the other side of the Atlantic. The Spectator (London), in the course of an analysis of the volume of some length, makes these observations:
"The Lectures before us have not had the advantage of Mr. Lowell's revision; but they do not perceptibly suffer from the want of it, and the reader who turns to them with interest for the author's sake will find his compensation in their intrinsic worth. Mr. Lowell's judgments, it is needless to say, are thoroughly independent, and his appreciation of the poets whom he criticises never runs into extravagance. Mr. Swinburne's generous, though not indiscriminate, praise of Ford is not echoed by Mr. Lowell, who considers his plays chiefly remarkable "for that filagree work of sentiment which we call sentimentality." Ford abounds, the lecturer thinks, in mock pathos, but he confesses that in his youth he was thoroughly imposed on by him."
