HERE, once more, is the first volume of Professor Dobree's
Introductions to English Literature, with its hundred pages of con- tentious, stimulating and scholarly introduc- tion and its three hundred pages of biblio- graphy, comment and biography. It is a most useful book, and differs from most of its kind in distinguishing clearly between what is readable and what has no more than antiquarian interest. The bibliography has been brought up to date, though, owing to the long hiatus of the war, there is less new work to record than there might have been. There are, however, one or two important omissions ; inexplicably there is no reference to Professor Carleton Brown's Religious Lyrics of the XYth Century, which came out in 1939, the year of this book's original appearance, or to Professor Robbins' Secular Lyrics of the XIV and XVth Cen- turies, which is perhaps too recent for
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