February, 1880.
Chatto & Windus's
List of Books.
Imperial 8vo, with 147 fine Engravings, half-morocco, 36s.
THE EARLY TEUTONIC, ITALIAN, MASTERS. AND FRENCH
Translated and Edited from the Dohme Series by A. H. Keane, M.A.I. With numerous Illustrations.
"Cannot fail to be of the utmost use to students of art history."—Times.
Crown 8vo, 1,200 pages, cloth extra, 12s. 6d.
THE READER'S HANDBOOK
OF ALLUSIONS, REFERENCES, PLOTS, AND STORIES.
By the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
The object of this Handbook is to supply readers and speakers with a lucid but very brief account of such names as are used in allusions and references, whether by poets or prose writers to furnish those who consult it with the plot of popular tales. Thus, it dramas, the story of epic poems, and the outline of well-known tales. Thus it gives in a few lines the story of Homer's "Iliad" and Odyssey," of Virgil's "Æneid," Lucan's "Pharsalia," and the "Thebaid" of Statins; of Dante's "Divine Comedy," Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered;" of Milton's " Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained;" of Thomson's Seasons; of Ossian's tales, the Nibelungen Lied" of the German Minnesingers, the " Romance of the Rose," the Lusiad" of Camoens, the "Loves of Theagenes and Charicleia by Heliodorus; with the several story poems of Chaucer, Gower, Piers Plowman, Halves, Spenser, Drayton, Phiueas Fletcher, Prior, Goldsmith, Campbell, Southey, Byron, Scott, Moore, Tennyson, Longfellow and so on. Far from limiting its scope to poe's, the Handbook tells, with similar brevity, the stories of our national fairy tales and romances, such novels as those by Charles Dickens, "Vanity Fair" by Thackeray, the "Rasselas" of Johnson, "Gulliver's Travels" by Swift, the "Sentimental Journey" bySterne, Don Quixote" and "Gil Bias," "Telemachus " by Fenelon, and "Undine" by De la Motte Fouque. Great pains have been taken with the Arthurian stories, whether from Sir T. Mallory's collection or from the "Mabinogion," because Tennyson has brought them to the front in his "Idylls of the King;" and the number of dramatic plots sketched out is many hundreds. Another striking and interesting feature of the book is the revelation of the source from which dramatists and romancers have derived their stories, and the strange repetitions of historic incidents. In the Appendix are added two lists: the first contains the historic incidents, date and author of the several dramatic works set down; and the second, the date of the divers poems or novels given under their author's name.
