In 1889, 1890, and 1891, Dr. H. Oskar Sommer edited, and Mr. Nutt published, in three volumes, what will henceforth be the best, if not quite the best possible, edition of Caxton’s original text, for the scholar and the student. It would be hard to over-rate the industry, the learning, and the munificent public spirit of these worthy representatives of Sir Thomas Malory and William Caxton. The first volume gives the text of the Althorp copy, page for page, line for line, word for word, and letter for letter, with no change but that of Roman for black letter type. It is, indeed, too scrupulously exact, for it reproduces the mistakes in Whittaker’s fac-simile pages which now form part of the Althorp copy, only correcting these by collations with the Osterley original, given in the second volume. Whittaker has no more authority than any other mere copyist; and the direct correction of his mistakes would have made Dr. Sommer’s reprint a perfect representation of the original while making a reprint of the collations unnecessary. Besides these collations, and others of the second edition of Wynkyn de Worde with the text of Caxton, Dr. Sommer’s second volume contains a complete bibliography of the original text and all its after editions; an Index of names of persons and places; a Glossary, or indeed dictionary, of words, whether obsolete or still in use; and an Essay on the language of the book. In the third volume, after a graceful essay by Mr. Andrew Lang on the literary merits of Malory, Dr. Sommer gives us a series—an original and very important series—of ‘Studies on the Sources’; and he prints from MSS. in the British Museum the only two of those ‘sources’ which had not been so made accessible already, either by ancient or modern editors. Into this hitherto chaotic mass of mediæval romances, French and English, prose or verse, Dr. Sommer has now first brought light and order. With an almost inconceivable amount of thoughtful and learned labour, he has collated the various manuscripts with the printed editions and with Malory’s book, in a detail which, great as it is, represents, as he tells us, a still more minute investigation of which he only gives the main results. With the exception of the story of Beaumains, which is an enlarged narration of that of La Cote Male Taile, and subject to the changes made by Malory’s own genius, all the adventures and incidents of Malory’s Morte Darthur are now shown to be found in one or more of these ‘sources,’ often translated literally from French, or transferred word for word from the English, yet still oftener so compressed and fused into a new shape that the finished work is but a tenth of the bulk of the original matter. Dr. Sommer arranges these sources into the four groups of the Merlin, the Lancelot, the Tristan, and the Prophecies of Merlin, and shows the relations of each group to the corresponding portions of Malory. He thinks, with M.