SOURCE: "George Edward Woodberry," in The Nation, Vol. 114, No. 2956, 1922, pp. 261-62.

In the following review of a reissue of six volumes of Woodberry's essays, Van Doren characterizes Woodberry as a mediocre critic

By collecting his literary criticism, or by permitting the Society which bears his name to collect it, Mr. Woodberry incurs the query whedier he is to be known among America's critics, and indeed the world's. The challenge of these large volumes [Literary Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century, Studies of a Literateur, Heart of Man and Other Papers, Appreciation of Literature and America in Literature, The Torch and Other Lectures and Addresses, and Literary Essays] is clear. They seek position beside the volumes of Emerson and Lowell, of Dryden and Johnson and Hazlitt and Macaulay and Pater, of Sainte-Beuve and Anatole France, of Lessing and Goethe. They are, of course, the work of a comprehensive critic. Are...