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478 tq LEITERS IN CANADA: 1959 Despite these limitations, some ofwhich are to be laid at Arnold's door rather than at Professor Robbins', this is a book which every student of Arnold or of nineteenth-century thought should read. It sheds a great deal of light upon Arnold's often peculiar processes of thought, traces many ofthe sources ofhis eclecticism, and clarifies the persisteut intentions that serve him as principles. Professor Robbins' thorough knowledge of Arnold, and his evident sympathy with him, lead him again and again to really penetrating insights, and his admiration stops sufficiently short of idolatry to allow him, time and again, to put a finger with great precision on a weakness in Arnold's own argument. Chapter VI, which brings the poetry into relation with the religious writings, seems to me particularly brilliant, as does chapter VIll, which I have already mentioned. The final chapter, which suggests, by "a glance at the contemporary scene," the relevance of Arnold to the thought ofour own time, is also very skilfully done. In his Preface, Professor Robbins modestly disclaims any consideration ofhis work as a "definitive" study; it is at least certain that any future study will profit by this one. (F. E. L. PRIESTLEY) The second volume of that gigantic scholarly enterprise, the Yale edition of Milton's prose, Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, II: 16431648 (New Haven and London: Yale and Oxford University Presses, pp. xiv, 840, $12.50), has now appeared. This volume, which contains the divorce pamphlets, the tractate Of Education, Areopagitica, and the private correspondence of those years, is edited by Professor Ernest Sirluck, who in addition to the general introduction supplies the preface and notes to Areopagitica. The annotation in this edition must seem to the non-specialist (and perhaps to some specialists too) full past the point of pedantry, but it may be justified by the intricate allusiveness of Milton's style and his explicit and implicit involvement in the complicated intellectual and political controversies of the day. In this volume, the notes to Of Education supplied by Professor Donald Dorion are conspicuously exhaustive: a whole history of Western education to 1644 could easily be worked up from them. But putting aside all differences of opinion about the technical aspects of the edition, we may praise without qualification Professor Sirluck's 216-page introduction, in which he relates the development of Milton's ideas to the contemporary realignments of opinion in the great debate on liberty which resounded from the pulpits and choked the presses during the Civil War. In this briefnotice it is impossible to do justice to his argument, except to observe that he demonstrates how HUMANITIES tq 479 Milton's "break with Presbyterianism toward the left" is characteristic of the most influential and provocative Puritan opinion during the period in question, and how the argument of the divorce tracts as it developed in Milton's mind was conditioned by the revolutionary applications of the "law of nature" which were being employed in the Puritan intellectuals' search for the rational grounds of civil liberty. Professor Sirluck has brought much fresh documentation and a gift for lucid analysis to bear upon an old subject, and the result is an important contribution to Milton studies and to the history of ideas in general. The task of annotating the divorce tracts is shared by Lowell W. Coolidge and Arnold Williams, and the letters are edited by W . Arthur Turner and Alberta T. Turner. (MILLAR MAcLuRE) In an author's note Mr. Paul West calls his "essay" The Fossils ofPiety: Literary Humanism in Decline (New York: Vantage [Toronto: Foulsham], pp. ii, 85, $2.75) an "argument with instances, rather than an exhaustive treatise." This seems rather more than self-evident as a description of seventy-five pages covering Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, Ernst Tunger, Santayana, Trilling, and others. He also remarks that he is arguing for no particular orthodoxy, religious or political, but is "aware that many of these writers almost arrive at the significant question: If the humanist can respect his faith only by narrowing it, might not that be worse than rejecting humanism for doctrines less secular?"--a statement which suggests...

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