Books: Good Gosse*

THE LIFE & LETTERS OF SIR EDMUND GOSSE—Evan Charteris—Harper ($5).†

Only old England could have produced him. In no other country could Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849-1928) have been at the same time so respectable and so successful. And few men even in England have added knighthood** to their grey hairs by pursuing to the end such a hog-calling as a literary critic's. Evan Charteris's biography, which lets Gosse's own letters do most of the work, gives a fair picture of this peripatetic, ponderous but proficient policeman of Parnassus.

For nine years (1919-28) Gosse made the London Times Literary Supplement portentous and powerful...