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SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF VOLUME I.

_THE ATHENAEUM._--"A thing complete and convincing beyond any former work
from the same hand. 'Hardly any one who takes a sufficient interest in
prosody to induce him to read this book' will fail to find it absorbing,
and even entertaining, as only one other book on the subject of
versification is: the _Petit Traite de poesie francaise_ of Theodore de
Banville.... We await the second and third volumes of this admirable
undertaking with impatience. To stop reading it at the end of the first
volume leaves one in just such a state of suspense as if it had been a
novel of adventure, and not the story of the adventures of prosody. 'I
am myself quite sure,' says Prof. Saintsbury, 'that English prosody is,
and has been, a living thing for seven hundred years at least.' That he
sees it living is his supreme praise, and such praise belongs to him
only among historians of English verse."

_THE TIMES._--"To Professor Saintsbury English prosody is a living
thing, and not an abstraction. He has read poetry for pleasure long
before he began to read it with a scientific purpose, and so he has
learnt what poetry is before making up his mind what it ought to be. It
is a common fault of writers upon prosody that they set out to discover
the laws of music without ever training their ears to apprehend music.
They theorise very plausibly at large, but they betray their incapacity
so soon as they proceed to scan a difficult line. Professor Saintsbury
never fails in this way. He knows a good line from a bad one, and he
knows how a good line ought to be read, even though he may sometimes be
doubtful how it ought to be scanned. He has, therefore, the knowledge
most essential to a writer upon prosody.... His object, as he constantly
insists, is to write a history, to tell us what has happened to our
prosody from the time when it began to be English and ceased to be
Anglo-Saxon; not to tell us whether it has happened rightly or wrongly,
nor even to be too ready to tell us why or how it has happened."

Professor W. P. KER in the _SCOTTISH HISTORICAL REVIEW_.--"The history
of verse, as Mr. Saintsbury takes it, is one aspect of the history of
poetry; that is to say, the minute examination of structure does not
leave out of account the nature of the living thing; we are not kept all
the time at the microscope. This is the great