GOSSE, SIR EDMUND (1849-1928), English poet and critic, born in London Sept. 21, 1849, son of the zoologist P. H. Gosse. In 1867 he became an assistant in the department of printed books in the British Museum, where he remained until he became in 1875 translator to the Board of Trade. In 1904 he was appointed librarian to the House of Lords and retired in 1914. In 1884-90 he was Clark Lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. Himself a writer of literary verse of much grace, and master of a prose style admirably expressive of a wide and appreciative culture, he was conspicuous for his valuable work in bringing foreign literature home to English readers. Northern Studies (1879), a collection of essays on the literature of Holland and Scandinavia, was followed by later work in the same direction. He translated Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891), and, with W. Archer, The Master-Builder (1893) , and in 190 7 he wrote a life of Ibsen for the "Literary Lives" series. He also edited the English translation of the works of Bjornson.
Gosse's published volumes of verse include On Viol and Flute (1873), King Erik (1876), New Poems (1879), Firdausi in Exile (1885), In Russet and Silver (1894), Collected Poems (1896), and Hypolympia, or the Gods on the Island (i9oi). His Seven teenth Century Studies (1883) , Life of William Congreve (1888), The Jacobean Poets (1894), Life and Letters of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's (1899), Jeremy Taylor (1904, "English Men of Letters"), and Life of Sir Thomas Browne (1905) form a very considerable body of critical work on the English 17th-century writers. He also wrote a life of Thomas Gray, whose works he edited (4 vols., 1884) ; A History of Eighteenth Century Litera ture (1889) ; A History of Modern English Literature (1897), and vols. iii. and iv. of an Illustrated Record of English Literature undertaken in connection with Dr. Richard Garnett. Gosse was always a sympathetic student of the younger school of French and Belgian writers, some of his papers on the subject being collected as French Profiles (1905). Critical Kit-Kats (1896) contains an admirable criticism of J. M. de Heredia, remi niscences of Lord de Tabley and others. To the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica he contributed numerous articles, and acted as chief literary adviser in the preparation of the loth and 11th editions. In 1905 he was entertained in Paris by the leading litterateurs as a representative of English literary culture. In 1907 he published anonymously Father and Son, an intimate study of his own early life, which was crowned by the Academie Francaise in 1913. In 1917 he published his Life of Algernon Charles Swin burne. He received numerous honours from universities and governments, British and foreign, and was knighted in 1925. He continued to write weekly critical articles in The Sunday Times, and selections from these were reprinted in Books on the Table (19 21) and More Books on the Table (1923). He published Silhouettes in 1925 and Leaves and Fruit in 1927. Edmund Gosse died in London on May 16, 1928.