Garstad describes Richard Garnett’s amusing short story ‘The Poet of Panopolis’, which fits so well the spirit of its age, as ‘a wooden fantasy’; well, ‘hard-nosed philologists’ (to use his expression) have no greater claim to be judges of literature than literary critics to pronounce on matters of technical scholarship. But what on earth does he mean by his closing sentence, ‘No great wonder this stuff had fallen out of copyright to make its publication possible, if not commendable’? Does he imagine that ‘out of copyright’ is conterminous with ‘out of print’? Even the latter is no disproof of merit, let alone the former.
BMCR 2007.01.06