`Browning really comes back to life in the marvellous third volume of the new Oxford Browning', wrote John Bayley, choosing it as one of his Books of the Year for 1988. While Volume III included six of the eight Bells and Pomegranates pamphlets, the present volume completes the series and includes the most remarkable of all, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. Here we find `Pictor Ignotus', `The Lost Leader', `The Bishop orders his Tomb', `The Laboratory', `The Boy and the Angel', and the first part of `Saul'. Also included are Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and the essay on Shelley. As the Times Literary Supplement reviewer of the earlier volumes commented, `readers of a poet like this need all the help they can get; and Jack and Smith have provided it in abundance.' Each poem is fully annotated, and accompanied by a detailed introduction which provides information on the chronology of composition and on Browning's sources.
Volume IV in the series on Browning, under the general editorship of Ian Jack, contains the remainder of the remarkable "Bells and Pomegranates" pamphlets, dramatic romances and the lyrics, "Luria" and "A Soul's Tragedy".
