Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[485] versions of each ballad theme. His collection is thus both a definitive corpus of English ballad material¹ and a notable exemplar of the comparative study of literature.

In both his fields of scholarship—Chaucer and the ballad— Child left numerous disciples; and besides the legacy of a fixed body of material ready to be taken as a point of departure, he left the materials for a very lively and still very active controversy upon ballad origins, into which, however, it is impossible to go here. Child himself died before completing the last volume of his Ballads, which was to have contained a general preface or introduction that would in all probability have given his view upon the mooted topics. The animation and playfulness of Child's learning must not go unmentioned. His humour everywhere leavens and feeds the very substance of his work—a humour which, playing with the solid materials of his scholarship, would have made him the ideal editor of those sane, humane, and playful persons, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Among the unwritten works, valde desiderata, of American scholaship, books like Norton's On the European Power of Italy, and Gildersleeve's History of Literary Satire, there must surely be counted the Shakespearian and Chaucerian texts and studies which Child did not produce.

It was the fortune of Thomas Raynesford Lcunsbury (1838– 1915) to produce studies of both Chaucer and of Shakespeare. In 1870 he was appointed instructor in English in the newly established Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, and in 1871 became professor in charge of the English department. The first fruit of his work in Chaucer was an edition of the Parlement of Foules in 1877. His History of the English language (1879) has gone through many editions and still holds its place as a standard textbook. It was in 1892 that he published the ripe results of his labors upon Chaucer. The studies in Chaucer comprise eight monographs. The first two present Chaucer's biography—one the biography as far as it is established by evidence and duly guarded inference from the documents, the other the mythical biography or ‘Chaucer Legend.’ This simple and profitable distinction Lounsbury seems to have been the first to make, and the effect is comparable to that of