abolish words altogether, and listening in', which abolishes everything else. Mr. H. V. Routh's essay, 'This World's Ideas of the Next', if less comprehensive than this title suggests, is a very impressive survey of the vast and complex history of other-world theories between the Christian era and Dante.

15

Finally, a little group of anthologies. Mr. Welby claims, very justly, that he has gathered of the best' in our poetry, 'so far as that is not already available in Palgrave's Golden Treasury'.1 Had he not chosen, surely with more modesty than discretion, to call it The Silver Treasury, no one would have suggested that it was a collection of the second-best. Several other modern anthologists, recognizing the defects of Palgrave's admirable book, have desired, like Mr. Binyon, to supplement it. Mr. Binyon has done this chiefly by adding the poetry of the last thirty or forty years. But Mr. Welby has drawn only upon the poetry scattered within Palgrave's limits of time, and his taste inclines to explore rather the earlier than the later regions of this vast domain. Palgrave was scarcely an Elizabethan in our sense, and he missed much of its wilder, as well as of its less decorous, music. He lived, too, before the age of Donne, and of Clare, was suspicious of Rochester, and not quite comfortable with Blake. In all these directions, and others, Mr. Welby has raised the barriers and let in much rare and brilliant poetry, such as the beautiful Lament for the Ruined Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham' (a poignant utterance of the Catholic side of the Reformation), Raleigh's The Wood, the Weed, the Wag', Rochester's A Drinking Cup', Clare's 'The Dying Child', and more than twelve songs of Blake. But there is much too that Palgrave would doubtless have included had his space allowed: Fletcher's Hear, ye Ladies that Despise', Dyer's 'Grongar Hill', Keats's 'Melancholy', Landor's Rose Aylmer' and 'Dirce', Poe's To Helen', Beddoes's If thou wilt ease thy heart', Marvell's 'Definitions of Love', and much more. The selection is made with a sure and fine taste.

A few words will suffice for the useful Anthology of Old and

15 The Silver Treasury of English Lyrics, ed. by T. Earle Welby. Chapman and Hall. pp. ix +235. 10s. 6d.

Middle English which Mr. G. Sampson has provided as a supplement or companion to the corresponding chapters of the C. H. E. L.16 Its scope is in general determined, as the plan requires, by that of the History; but this has made rather for enlargement than for limitation of the usual contents of Old and Middle English readers. We note, for instance, with pleasure the extracts from the Mabinogion illustrating the Arthurian legend. The Introductions to the several pieces by the editor are rightly drawn largely from the salient corresponding passages of the History. The General Introduction commends the potion of our older literature to the beginner rather than to the advanced student, but with a persuasive charm not always associated, as here, with ripe scholarship. As a mere matter of economy in time and type we could wish that the editor's acknowledgements for leave to reprint could have been made collectively in the preface instead of under each piece in the Table of Contents.

Mr. Havelock Ellis's Impressions and Comments 17 fall into many other categories more appropriately than into that of English Work'. Literature forms but one of the countless strands of interest, observation, imagination, reflection, which are woven, not laboriously but luckily, into the texture of pages which constitute, as he says, rather a journal than a book. But the occasional comments on literature are often remarkable in their unsought, unlaboured felicity, and the criticism gains in richness and subtlety by the writer's sensitive familiarity with other mediums of artistic expression-architecture, painting, music. Thus in a discussion of his thesis that every nation is great only in one style of architecture he drops by the way the illuminating sentence: Flaubert in his Tentation is a great Norman architect'. Brief or discursive notes disengage unfamiliar aspects of Shakespeare, Rossetti, Addison and Steele, Meredith, and many more. And it may not be out of place to close this introductory chapter of The Year's Work with

16 The Cambridge Book of Prose and Verse: From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance, ed. by George Sampson. C.U.P. pp. xxxviii+438. 10s. 6d. Impressions and Comments. First and Second Series (now reissued). Constable. pp. 262, 248. 6s. each.

Mr. Ellis's pregnant 'character' of the land and people of which English literature is the child:

'What a strange fate it is that made England! A little ledge of beautiful land in the ocean, to draw and keep all the men in Europe who had the sea in their hearts and the wind in their brains, daring children of Nature, greedy enough and romantic enough to trust their fortunes to waves and to gales. The most eccentric of peoples, all the world says, and the most acquisitive, made to be pirates and made to be poets, a people that have fastened their big teeth into every quarter of the globe, and flung their big hearts in song at the feet of Nature, and even done both things at the same time. The man who wrote the most magnificent sentence in the English language was a pirate and died on the scaffold.'

II

PHILOLOGY: GENERAL WORKS

[By J. R. R. TOLKIEN]

IT is merry in summer when shaws be sheen and shrads full fair and leaves both large and long'. Walking in that wood is full of solace. Its leaves require no reading. There is another and a denser wood where some are obliged to walk instead, where saws are wise and screeds are thick and the leaves too large and long. These leaves we must read (more or less), hapless vicarious readers, and not all we read is solace. The tree whereon these leaves grow thickest is the Festschrift, a kind of growth that has the property of bearing leaves of many diverse kinds. To add to the labour of inspecting them the task of sorting them under the departments of philology to which they belong would take too long. With a few exceptions we must take each tree as it comes.

In the wood of 1925 appeared Anglica1 in honour of Brandl's seventieth birthday; Probleme der englischen Sprache und Kultur in honour of J. Hoops' sixtieth; Germanica,3 a monument to Sievers and his seventy-fifth birthday; Neusprachliche Studien in honour of Luick's sixtieth birthday; and Mélanges de Philologie offered to Vising on his seventieth. These works continue to appear, doubtless, because they offer special facilities for the publication of notes and articles sometimes too long and 1 Anglica: Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie (Palaestra 147 and 148). Leipzig: Mayer & Müller. pp. (Band I) 184, (Band II) 474.

2 Probleme der englischen Sprache und Kultur (Germanische Bibliothek, II. Abteilung, 20), herausg. von W. Keller. Heidelberg: Winter. pp. viii + 270.

3 Germanica: Eduard Sievers zum 75. Geburtstage. Halle a. d. Saale : Niemeyer. pp x+727. 40s.

Neusprachliche Studien (Die Neueren Sprachen, 6. Beiheft). Marburg: Elwert. pp. 279.

5 Mélanges de Philologie offerts à M. Johan Vising. Göteborg (Gumperts); Paris (Champion). pp. xii +419. Limited to 250 copies.

elaborate, sometimes too fugitive and slight, for the ordinary and overcrowded receptacles. Chiefly they are due to affection and honour for great names and figures, and are a melancholy reminder of the age of the older generation of giants who have laboured in the service of Philologia and have deserved so well of her.

In this chapter we are only concerned with Band I (Sprache und Kulturgeschichte) of Anglica, and with the first part of this. Kulturgeschichte indeed is represented only by Die Selbständigkeitsbewegung der englischen Kolonien (Dibelius)—which belongs to a class of writing for which there appears to be an astonishing appetite in Germany to-day-and The Reform of Modern Language Teaching in the Dutch Universities (Falconer), which is interesting and instructive. In the linguistic part there are seven articles, all worthy of attention. Two of them in the field of place-name studies will be dealt with below. Professor Horn takes a special case of Zweck und Ausdruck in der Sprache and discusses negation in English, regarded as a field in which the struggle between the diverging needs of practical utility and expressiveness is specially observable.

It is in a line with his other recent writings, though the workings of Affekt in altering forms and disturbing the normal phonological developments are here more convincingly made out. The article, which runs to less than eighteen pages, is not, of course, exhaustive or profound, but it deals with, or touches on, several points of interest, for instance: the history of the form and significance of such negatives as nealles (naes), the compounds with wiht, and never; the decay of the repeated negative in English; and the employment of do. The foot-notes are well provided with references.

Keltisches im englischen Verbum has an engaging title. It invites scepticism at the outset, for there are hitherto not many of those interested in English who, like Professor M. Förster, confess to an interest in Celtic or dare to mingle the two studies. Professor Keller's article is none the less worthy of attention, especially in the matter of the forms in b- of the verb 'to be' in Old English. It is impossible not to agree that many of the OE. forms from the b- stem, and the (partial) differentiation