Had Leon Edel's Stuff of Sleep and Dreams been written many years earlier, Aubrey's Brief Lives would, I suspect, have been a good deal longer. For the discipline of literary psychology, relatively new to practitioners of literature and psychology, has now, in a series of “experiments,” been formulated and refined for us by one of the most celebrated biographers of this century. One need only glance through the book to be stopped on page after page by such claims as: “… nothing is more chronic in writers than their sadness.” “If we pierce any artist's legend, we discover an all-too-troubled human.” “What does a man do when he creates a myth? Often he makes everything into opposites.” “Take any anthology and read poems at random and you cannot but be struck by the underlying sadness even in poems of joy….” These are the assertions of one who has dominion over his material, who has phrased his question precisely and sought the answer relentlessly — someone who has pursued his