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MILTONISTS IN MOSAIC' It would be illuminating to know the history of learned annotation of literary texts from its Alexandrianbeginnings through the time of the great Renaissance scholiasts to the present: the appearance of the annotation on the page is almost as interesting as the canons of relevance obeyed. Belying, or escaping, his supposed 1inearity: the learned humanist (the supreme 'typographic man' if there is such an animal), while always affirming the idea of a coherent text and consecutive discourse, 'makes a heap of all that he can find' (as old Nennius wrote) and occupies himself with turning gravel into design. He presents his readers with not so much a succession as a mosaic of facts, clustered (if his printer will let him) in the margins and at the foot of the page. And if he combines his own comments cum notis variorum, what we have is a polyphony of voices - the poet's own and the editor's and those of a multitude of poets and poetasters, editors and botchers, wits and dunces, all going at it hammer and tongs, yet fixed for the contemplation of the judicious and candid reader. Like the earlier volume on the Latin, Greek, and Italian poems, the variorum commentary on the minor English poems of Milton is printed without the text of the poems. Some smiles were exchanged when this apparent victory of the secondary over the primary was announced, but really it is eminently sensible: the Columbia text is implied throughout, but any text of Milton is usable, and it is not possible for the variorum to be what it is - a compact library of Milton scholarship - and a text of Milton at the same time. Its usefulness can hardly be overstated: it will immediately prove indispensable for the study of Milton, and all Miltonists - learned doctors and graduate students - should go without meat to possess it; it is full of pointed and succinct references invaluable to the study of classical and Renaissance literature and thought ( see the notes on Pan and Orpheus and the Pastoral Elegy and Haemony, to mention a few) ; and it is a chrestomathy of learning and lore, folly and wisdom, so that the reader consulting it on one point is likely to remain with it for the afternoon, as he does with Burton's Anatomy or with Fowler's Modern English Usage. With a laugh that left a broad margin for irony A.S.P. Woodhouse used to say late in life that he had found his vocation as an annotator, collecting, arranging and, after knocking some heads together, coming up with a correct adjudication: 'I don't want to be new, just right: Students will remember him in his more boisterous moments sweeping certain Miltonists into a limbo of vanity; but the part of the labour that he lived to complete, for the most part annotation of individual poems, shows him patient and painstaking and in a deep sense friendly. Professor Douglas Bush, in summarizing the modem critics, gives a few of them an earnest of the wrath to come, but he is solicitous to draw out the best that each of his commentators has to offer to the common store. His tone is friendly too, in keeping with the nature of literary and ".A.S.P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, ed., A Variorum Commentary on The Poems of John Milton, Part I, Volume Two: The Minor English Poems. Montreal: McGill·Queen's University Press 1972. Three parts, pp xvii, 1143. $17.50 each part UTQI Vo!utJJe XLm, Numher 1, Fan 1973 MILTONISTS IN MOSAIC 91 scholarly fellowship as a telling of 'fame's eternal beadroll'; consistent too with the sustained effort that has enabled him to bring his late friend's work so nobly to completion. (WilLIAM BLISSETT) THE GOLDEN BOUGH AND LITERATURE' The relation of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough to modem literature has been the subject of much casual comment, with only an occasional essay to elaborate on the common assumptions shared about Frazer's work. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough is therefore a welcome addition to a bleak area of literary studies, though it leaves the reader...

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