Our obligations to Gantner, keeper of the Woelfflin legacy and lively educator at Basle University, are considerable. Not only has he spotted neglected issues in the thought and work of Leonardo, but the very faults of his recent book tend to give new impetus to our thinking about Leonardo. It is not to lessen but to specify Gantner's merits, if one feels that, as distinct from the dedicated philology and presentation of the relevant materials, which he has handled beautifully, there remain questions of proportion, of adequacy and philosophy in the interpretation of these documents.

Every age, nation, generation, and representative mouthpiece selects from the cultural heritage the materials and viewpoints most nearly like itself. Thus it comes about that we have that many Platos, Shakespeares (especially Hamlets), and now according to Gantner the ‘fourth Leonardo’, his own.

There is such a paucity of information about Henry Shirley and his one extant play that one hesitates to add anything to the present state of our knowledge lest one be accused of abusing Bullen's confession that ‘Henry Shirley's claim to attention is not a very pressing one’. Bullen's apologia for presenting Henry Shirley's work in that ‘yet there is a certain dignity of language in this old play’ must be my excuse, too, for this attempt to redeem something of the play from ‘utter oblivion’ and my more specific warrant hales from the last words of Bullen's introduction—‘the songs, too, are smoothly written’.

The songs do in fact constitute the major part of the play's quite extensive use of thematic music connected with the supernatural ascent and descent of angels to comfort and exhort the much beleaguered Christians.