Professor Hough is probably best known for his exceptional work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and particularly for his books The Romantic Poets (1953) and The Last Romantics (1949). This volume consists of essays, written at various stages of his career, on Coleridge, Jane Austen, Tennyson, Poe, Yeats, T.S. Eliot and John Crowe Ransom, as well as three more on general topics - 'Criticism as a humanist discipline', 'An eighth type of ambiguity' and 'The modernist lyric'. Together they make up a distinguished and wide-ranging collection of literary studies, which displays throughout the characteristic precision and insight of Professor Hough's writings.