Ephemera Critica; Or, Plain Truths About Current Literature

This is a furious, eloquent manifesto from an age anxious about culture. John Churton Collins wrote these essays in an era when science seemed to promise certainty while literature drifted in chaos, and he would not accept the drift. He confronts the universities directly: how did the study of literature, once the crown of educated mind, become a disordered wilderness without standards, rigor, or clear purpose? Collins sees crisis everywhere, in the absence of qualified critics, in the gap between scholarly knowledge and public taste, in the universities' quiet surrender to scientific prestige. His remedy is impassioned and specific: literary education grounded in classical depth and historical seriousness. These pages offer more than period critique; they reveal enduring tensions about what we study, why we study it, and who decides. For readers interested in Victorian cultural anxiety, education reform, or the foundations of modern literary studies, Collins is a passionate, principled voice worth hearing.