The career of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, from 1401 to 1439 is hardly to be equalled in the annals of chivalry, even by that earlier Richard, Cœur-de-Lion It is no part of this introductory note to his Virelai, to rehearse in detail the extraordinary events of his long life of travel, adventure, warfare, and diplomacy. Mr. James Gairdner's life of the hero tells the story of his chief exploits, and those to whom Dugdale's Warwickshire is accessible may read it in detail. But to come upon a literary personality in the fifteenth century is so rare a thing, and the character of Richard Beauchamp is so happy an example of a true knight of the Middle Ages, that these few notes upon him and his family, most of them not in Gairdner's article, will not come amiss to the student of the period.

Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757; second edition, considerably enlarged, 1759) was received in Germany no less hospitably than in England. Lessing wrote about it in 1757 and 1758 to his friends Mendelssohn and Nicolai, planned to translate it, and left Bemerkungen on sundry points in it; Mendelssohn reviewed it; Herder considered, like Lessing, the making of a translation, referred to Burke in letters, in Das vierte kritische Wäldchen, and in conversation with Lessing; Christian Garve published a translation; and Burke's treatise was not without influence on Kant and Schiller.

American criticism of Shakespeare began in 1753 with a New York woman, Charlotte Ramsay, best known as Mrs. Lennox. Until fifteen years of age she lived in America with her father, Colonel James Ramsay, Lieutenant-Governor of New York City. Thence she went to London and, being thrown upon her own resources, supported herself, both before and after marriage, by her literary labors. During her long life of eighty-four years (1720–1804) novels, poems, comedies, memoirs, and translations flowed from her prolific pen. That her intellect was of no mean order is known from Dr. Johnson's testimony. He considered her ability equal to that of Hannah More or Fanny Burney.

Some thirty years ago, Matthew Arnold, in one of those magnificently cumulative passages with which he so loved to dazzle his readers, said of the future of poetry: “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, when it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact, and now the fact is failing it. Poetry, on the other hand, attaches its emotion to the idea, the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.”