"He gloried in antiquarian lore and antiquarian literature.
Hardly `Old Monkbarns' himself could have pored over a black-letter volume
with greater enthusiasm. Especially he loved the tales of chivalry,
and thus, when the opportunity came, was fully equipped
as an interpreter of Froissart and `King Arthur' for the benefit of
our younger generation of students. With the great Elizabethans
Lanier was equally familiar. Instead of skimming Shakespeare,
he went down into his depths. Few have written so subtly
of Shakespeare's mysterious sonnets. Through all Lanier's productions
we trace the influence of his early literary loves; but nowhere do
the pithy quaintnesses of the old bards and chroniclers display themselves
more effectively -- not only in the illustrations, but through
the innermost warp and woof of the texture of his ideas and his style --
than in some of his familiar epistles."*
--
* `Letters', p. 220.
--
That Lanier kept in touch, too, with contemporary literature
is shown by an acute criticism of Browning's "The Ring and the Book",
then recently published: "Have you seen Browning's `The Ring and the Book'?
I am confident that, at the birth of this man, among all the good fairies
who showered him with magnificent endowments, one bad one
-- as in the old tale -- crept in by stealth and gave him
a constitutional twist i' the neck, whereby his windpipe became,
and has ever since remained, a marvelous tortuous passage.
Out of this glottis-labyrinth his words won't, and can't, come straight.
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