Literary history—a blend of biography, bibliography, philosophy, sociology, criticism, flour, soda and cream o’tartar—follows in the wake of literature as inevitably as martial history in the wake of war. Moreover it far-reachingly affects the development of letters, imbuing the impressionable young with a prejudice in favour of such things as are selected to be recorded, applauded and permanently enrolled in the national archives. Hence the literary historian bears a high responsibility towards literature and the nation.

Now that a mighty geste of spade-work has been performed by Professor Morris Miller in marshalling in their battalions the pen-men of our first century and a quarter, not to mention Judge Ferguson’s even more laborious researches into the less significant decades of that era, we can almost hear the historians pulling off their coats for a spot of the toil to which this wealth of assembled material beckons them. May we in this place with due humility indicate one or two canons which might with advantage be observed in the proper presentation of the rising fabric of a stately literature?