The last of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s writing is an unfinished note, made during a retreat in Dublin, on the wedding feast at Cana: ‘There has been no stint, but there has been an unwise order in the serving’. It might stand, Father Devlin suggests, ‘for posterity’s estimate of him as well as the steward’s of the wine’. For that matter it might stand for the two volumes that now complete the gathering together of all the fragments of Hopkins’s writing. Rarely can a poet’s papers have been edited with such care, and at first one wonders at the industry that has been devoted to editing material which is often trivial and even tedious. Simply as an editorial achievement, the work of the late Humphry House (completed by Mr Graham Storey) and of Father Devlin will surely remain of classic importance. Here, exactly ordered and sympathetically annotated, is all the detailed record that remains of Hopkins’s curiosity about words or weather (‘Sept. 17. Dull. Sept. 18. Cold. Sept. 19. Dull, I think.’), of doubts and decisions (usually cryptically indicated), with often penetrating glimpses at the world that was his— Oxford, holiday journeys, Jesuit houses. Unfair, then, to say that much in both these books is unimportant. In themselves the diary entries and the retreat notes, the undergraduate essays and the sermons, are hardly likely to earn for Hopkins a new fame. There is little that distinguishes much of them from the papers of any scholarly priest of his period—and there were many—who had lived in Oxford during the years after Newman’s conversion and who shared the taste of the time for botany, country walks, music and ecclesiology.