English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama (The Completion of the Clark Lectures, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1944)

this book I had the idea perhaps most I literary historians have of giving each author space W in proportion to the value I set on him; but I found it would not do. Things need to be treated at length not in so far as they are great but in so far as they are complicated. Good books which are remote from modern sympathy need to be treated at greater length than good books which everyone already knows and loves. Bad books may be of importance for the history of taste and if they are passed over too briefly the student's picture of a period may be distorted. Finally, if I had worked strictly to scale I should have been forced either to leave out many minor authors altogether.........