BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.
PUBLICATIONS continue to be mercifully few,' and it is again the presses of the Universities and learned institutions that send the most important books. The complete Poetical Works of Austin Dobson, edited by Alban Dobson (Oxford University Press), give an opportunity of establishing Dobson's
contribution to literature. He anticipated the critic's task, and avoided his strictures, by forming himself, in perfect
honesty, a true valuation of his gifts : he allowed that he was a poet of small things and offered a very mild and reasonable confession of faith :- " Leave Pindus Hill to those who list, Iconoclast or anarchist—
So be it. They that break shall pay. I stand upon the ancient way. I hold it for a certain thing,
That, blank or rhyming, verse must sing ; And more, that what is good for verse, Need not, by dint of rhyme, grow worse."
The University Press of Liverpool sends A Lancashire Anthology. edited by May Yates. It is unfortunate that a
preference for dialect should have excluded from the selection a number of poems which are typically provincial in their freedom from contemporary fashion, but are written in our common English. We opened this anthology with a hope that here at last we should find justice to the merits of John Byrom, a poet of the eighteenth century who kept remarkably free from the infection of antithetic couplets ; but we found only one poem of his—an agreeable exercise in dialect. Lovers of dialect, however, will find much vivid phrasing in this selection, and lovers of the humour of the poor will find it a storehouse of examples.
The British Museum has published ten more sets of beauti- fully reproduced postcards. Six of them arc illustrations
of periods in English History ; the others are material for the study of Early Britain, Roman Britain, Historical Medals, and Anglo-Saxon and Irish Art. We have received from the India Society a book of Examples of Indian Sculpture at the British Museum, containing twelve plates selected by Mr. Laurence Binyon and an introduction by Professor Rothenstein. Lord Teignmouth and Mr. Charles Harper have combined their erudition to produce The Smugglers (Cecil Palmer), a book which seems as exciting as legend but is actually a selection from fact. Professor Coupland has written a biography of Wilberforce (Clarendon Press):
all monographs on " the Emancipator " have long been out of print. The Oxford University Press publishes a short
history of "Lady Margaret" Hall.
THE LITERARY EDITOR.
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