For thirty years C. H. Herford worked diligently and broadly in Continental as well as English literature, earning a reputation for his discernment and breadth of knowledge. His longtime collaborator on The Man and His Work, Ben Jonson (1925-1952), Percy Simpson, observed that Herford's "critical range was marvellous: he knew all the literature of Europe. He was a scholar to the finger-tips.... To accuracy and knowledge he added fine and far-sighted appreciation and the 'wide and luminous view.'" Herford's major biographical achievements were The Age of Wordsworth (1897); the life and critical introductions contained in the first two volumes of the Oxford Ben Jonson; two short biographies, Robert Browning (1905) and Wordsworth (1930); and entries for John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Cambridge History of English Literature (1916). His early commitment to literary history motivated his first major work, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in...