Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/173

RECENT FOREIGN LITERATURE. 161 then reproduces them whole. The art of oratory seems to be dying out, or to be little cultivated, except perhaps in France. There is an idea that art, if cared for and studied, cannot be sincere, and that if our speakers really feel and believe what they say, the best way to convey that fact is to speak roughly, to use ugly words and expressions. The one method is as likely to be insincere as the other ; but few will deny that the pleasure to be derived from fine oratory is a very real one, and that conviction is more likely to result from a speech beautifully composed and beautifully de- livered. Any way, it can do no harm to study the methods of the great orators of the past. Foreign scholars industriously pursue their studies in English literature. Fernand Henry, who dedicates his book to Edmund Gosse, has translated Spenser's ' Amoretti,' and furnished them with a brief biographical and critical introduction and a few notes. He has already translated Shake- speare's sonnets, Milton's c L' Allegro,' 'II Pen- seroso,' ' Lycidas,' and ' Sonnets,' Mrs. Browning's ' Sonnets from the Portuguese,' and Fitzgerald's version of c Omar Khayam.' Like Sir Sidney Lee, Henry finds that the poets of Elizabethan England owe a large debt to France, and he has made a parallel study of Desportes and Spenser. But although there are many similarities, Spenser is never servile in his imitation. In Henry's opinion, the originality of Spenser's sonnets resides in the fact that the man is most easily known through them in the two emotions that most deeply move him love and his adoration of beauty. He ranks v M