he never praised for fashion’s sake alone—one to challenge lightly a received opinion. But he was fortunate in finding one unworked field, that of the song-books, which seem to have been overlooked by previous literary historians as the affair of the musicians. From these song-books he unearthed a wealth of lyric verse which has been a permanent addition to our literature.
Gifted with an intense appreciation of beauty—especially of that beauty of the English countryside, of old villages and the river meadows in spring, and of all the literature in which such beauty finds expression, and with a memory which seemed to let slip nothing that he had ever rejoiced to find, he loved the literature of the Elizabethan age and all that in any way echoed it, and out of his love for it he studied it and made it his own. But the treatment of that literature as a series of problems was hateful to him, and for the intellectual pleasure that can be derived from research he cared, I think, but little, unless he could see clearly that that research added to the glory of those old poets whom he loved. Indeed he was frankly scared of the minuteness of “German” editorial methods, for which he had a curious mixture of loathing and respect, and even came to feel that much of his own editorial work was out of date—a fear which unluckily caused the abandonment of the revised edition of his “Marlowe” after the first volume was all in type and had received its final corrections. The truth is, of course, that there is room for several ways of editing any book which is worth editing at all, and that Bullen’s way was for many readers, perhaps for the majority, the best.
The “serious” student will perhaps find that, with one or two exceptions, these lectures contain little that is altogether new to him, but it will do him much good to read them. Indeed I would especially commend them to all such students as the work of a man who never forgot that one of the objects of literature is to give pleasure, and as an admirable corrective to the mental attitude which may be induced by too exclusive absorption in the more painful kinds of research.
Of the ten papers in the volume perhaps those on Nicholas Breton, Thomas Dekker, and William Bullein will prove most attractive, the two first because of the evident sympathy with which they are written, the last on account of the novelty of the matter, for it deals with one who is practically unknown to most literary students. The essay on Drayton also is an excellent piece of work,
