interest, accompanied by a series of reproductions of his pictures which draw new atten- 

 tion to his originality and power. The centenaries of Browning, Thackeray and Dickens 

 can hardly be said to have elicited much authorship of permanent value. Mr. Hall 

 Griffin's Early Life of Browning is a laborious enumeration and itinerary without very 

 much illumination; Mr. Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are in part a working over 

 of material which found its most savoury expression in his Life of Charles Dickens. A 

 valuable portrait of Dickens as editor has been disclosed in the Letters faithfully edited 

 by Mr. Lehmann; an effervescence of curiosity respecting the mystery of Dickens's 

 last unfinished novel Edwin Drood has found interesting expression in speculations by 

 Prof. Henry Jackson, Cuming Walters, .Chesterton, Andrew Lang, William Archer and 

 Sir W. Robertson Nicoll. 



General. The simultaneous publication of the 28 volumes of the nth edition of the 

 Encyclopaedia Britannica early in 1911, under the aegis of the Cambridge University 

 Press, stands out as a unique event in the literary history of the last two years, on which 

 it would be unbecoming here to dwell further. Much literary energy and research has 

 also been concentrated upon such standard works of reference as the second supplement 

 (for 1900-11) to the Dictionary of National Biography, the progress of the great Oxford 

 New English Dictionary (still incomplete), Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and 

 Ethics, the revised edition of " G.E.C.'s " valuable historical Peerage, and important 

 subject-indexes such as those of the British Museum and London Library. 



Among the reprint series of the day Everyman's Library has steadily extended its 

 titles towards the promised goal of one thousand, most of them judiciously chosen. It 

 has found a serious rival in enterprise in Nelson's Shilling Library, comprising for the 

 most part more recent books, the majority of them still protected by copyright; this 

 shilling library has also incorporated in its list a number of French and .German books 

 of standard value. 



Of more original interest than these is the new series of miniature monographs known 

 as the Home University Library. The title is not particularly happy in these days when 

 a university is brought to almost every door, and the editors of the series, Gilbert Murray, 

 Herbert Fisher and Prof. J. Arthur Thomson, are hardly self-taught prodigies of home- 

 culture. But the series is cleverly conceived, and the volumes both well-informed and 

 remarkable for lucid exposition. One of the most promising literary signs, indeed, in 

 England is the steadily increasing excellence both of such small manuals and also of the 

 larger standard works of reference upon which the general staff of the world's activity 

 has so often to put its reliance. 



Among the general tendencies of the commerce of books the comparative absence of 

 really good books about books and their authors has been hardly less marked than the 

 excessive duplication and reduplication of colour topographies, anthologies, nature and 

 open-air books, books of maxims, books on education and military science, expanded 

 centenary articles and heavily padded memoirs, many of these^last by complete amateurs, 

 most of them useless and nearly all of them quite superfluous. Book society, 

 like that of the beau monde, has increased beyond self-knowledge. The publishers arc 

 probably right in maintaining that the career of more than half the books now issued is 

 made, not by the ability of the authors,, but by the vague appetite for new books stimu- 

 lated if not created by their own cleverness in tuning the public. As the tendency of the 

 age is certainly not to increase the amount of time devoted to reading, the position of 

 the printed book approximates more and more to that of the periodical. Books tend to 

 become less and less carefully differentiated and assessed, less cherished, and a good 

 deal more transitory both in their appeal and their impact than they were a quarter 

 of a century ago, (THOMAS SECCOMBE.) 



The Press. In London journalism (see E. B. xix, 557-563) two important recent changes 

 are to be noted. In August 1012 Mr. G. E. Buckle (b. 1854) retired from the editorship of 

 the Times, which he had held since 1884, and was succeeded by Mr. Geoffrey Robinson 

 (b. 1874), a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, who had joined the staff a year or so before, after 

 having been editor of the Johannesburg .Star in South Africa, where he had originally gone in 

 1901 as private secretary to Lord Milner. In this connection reference may also be made 



