Though he was an immensely prolific writer, the range of E. V. Lucas's sensibility was actually rather narrow. His work as an essayist and a novelist is charming but lightweight; his essays perhaps mark the end of the bellelettristic tradition in England. He achieves and sustains an attractive and effective lucidity of style but is prone to lapse into the sentimental. His work seems consciously to avoid any confrontation with the extremes of human experience and to cultivate a rather cozy optimism safely sheltered from real unpleasantness. His work is thoroughly gentlemanly, its "politeness" a matter of both idiom and matter. Such considerations impose severe limitations on his range and understanding as a literary critic and a literary biographer. His literary interests seem on the evidence of his published work to be confined almost totally to a small group of writers, of whom Charles Lamb (Lucas was to...