4. Arundell Esdaile, The Sources of English Literature
Mr Esdaile, deserting the precedent of his predecessors in the Sandars Lectureship, has addressed himself to the young and inexperienced, and has produced an outline sketch which will be of service to students of English literature who are entering upon what is sometimes called ‘post-graduate research.’ They will not, of course, find him full enough, for he divides bibliographies into twelve classes, to the description of which he can give only 100 pages; but he has the merit of mentioning a great many works of importance, and of never praising a bad book (unless, perhaps, when he is complimentary to that pretentious, incomplete and irritating manual, Mr. de Ricci's Book Collector's Guide). His position at the British Museum has enabled him to give useful hints on such matters as the Museum system of cataloguing anonyma, the indexing of the Thomason Tracts, and other domestic matters, though sometimes a small addition would add much to the value of the information; it is mentioned, for instance, that Charles Burney's collection of old newspapers is bound up in order of date, but the period concerned is not stated, and, incidentally, Nichols’ similarly arranged files are ignored. And is it true that the Lamport books obtained by the British Museum were all duplicates of copies in the Britwell collection? Some of them have been described as unique.
In other libraries, Mr. Esdaile is less safe; to say that the library of John H. Wrenn, in Texas, is ‘catalogued by Wrenn and Wise’ is at best highly misleading, and the reader who finds, among the ‘chief dramatic collections’, that ‘The Malone and Kemble copies have every leaf separately mounted’, may reasonably doubt whether Mr. Esdaile has ever even handled a Malone play. The reference to the well-known Irish bibliographer, Mr. E. R. McClintock Dix, as ‘Mr. E. R. McCraken Dix’, is also unfortunate. But the student who has chosen an English Literature subject for a BLitt thesis will do well to read this book with care; it contains much useful information, concisely given, together with such valuable cautions as that on publishers’ advertisements in the eighteenth century, and such occasional hints as the recommendation (which we heartily endorse) of Sayle's use of the broken square bracket, or of Mr. Esdaile's own method of tabular indexing.