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If the literary lecture habit were not developing in response to a quite definite public demand, it might seem to some of us that the practice of writing books about books was being overdone. But evidently the general reader has no time in these days for fiddling about in old bookshelves : so the expert is commissioned to prepare a guide from his own preferences and dislikes. The resulting study is not always as detached as it might be, but in Nature in Literature (Hogarth Press, 3s. 6d.) Mr. Edmund Blunden has done an admirable piece of critical work ; in fact, we can think of no writer in England who could have reviewed the subject so clearly and with such felicity in the choice of studies. He manages to write even of Gilbert White without boring us, though to say that there has lately been a superfluity of Selbornian literature is to come short of the truth : and his discussions on the writings of Duck and Bloomfield, the " farmers' boys " of our literature, though brief, are perhaps the most succinct estimates of those not unexpectedly neglected poets' works that have been written.
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