21 NOVEMBER 1925, Page 21

Mr. Osbert Burdett, of course, walks most familiarly in the

. nineteenth century. In his Critical Essays (Faber and Gwyer)_ he does not show the lucidity and easy friendship with critical standards that mark Mr. Dobree ; he has a mind that is more involved and more likely to lose itself in random ideas. Or, to balance this seeming dispraise, we might say that he has more sobriety. The essays in his new book are various in subject—Hawthorne, Meredith, Shelley, Peacock, Mr. Charles Chaplin, The Effect of Printing on Literature—and in each of them. Mr. Burdett writes with a quiet sensitiveness.

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