An Illustrated History of English Literature. Volume Two: Ben Jonson
to Samuel Johnson. By A. C. Ward. (Longmans, Green and Co., 25s.)
THE best feature of this book is undoubtedly the contribution of Miss Elizabeth Williams, who has selected and annotated a large number of coloured plates, engravings, and fascimiles. These portraits, title-pages and documents arc always interesting and often (as in the reproduc- tion of William Hole's title-page for the Workes of Ben Jonson, 1616) really illuminating. Mr. Ward's accompanying commentary is amusing and readable, but is really no more than a cement for these bricks. The illustrations would make the book an excellent teaching instrument in schools, as long as there is some qualified teacher on hand to prevent the young from absorbing wholesale some of Mr. Ward's more erratic judgements, such as that Johnson's Vanity of Ilientan Wishes shows a 'specious but essentially gimcrack cynicism' and lacks 'genuine satirical conviction,' and in general to warn them that the author's opinions are very much his own. Such a teacher would probably conclude that his charges could be safely left to read the sections which deal with prose writers—Swift and Defoe are intelligently discussed-,--but that it would hardly be right to leave them under the impres- sion that Mr. Ward's perfunctory treatment of Donne, and his hardly less inadequate section on Milton, represent the state of mature literary opinion. For both young and older readers, however, the useful illustrations, and the gener- ally handsome production, make the book quite well worth the price asked. JOHN WAIN
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