The fourth volume of Archie Burnett's Collected Prose covers Eliot's emeritus period. All his major accomplishments now lay behind him. Nevertheless, his sharp wit remains. The collection includes essays that repeatedly turn to questions that pre-occupied Eliot throughout his career: literary standards, historical continuity, the formation of taste, and the relation between literature and culture.

The prose work demonstrates a mastery, confidence, and ease that is not as notable in his earlier works. Eliot's characteristic discipline and economy are still there even when he adopts a more conversational tone.

Burnett's editorial approach serves these writings especially well. Presented chronologically, they reveal a remarkable consistency of purpose. Decades after "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot remains preoccupied with tradition. Decades after his earliest reviews, he remains concerned with standards. The continuity is instructive. Intellectual fashions changed around him; his central commitments endured. He still held sway on the syllabi of literary courses in universities in America but a decade or so after his death, this hold would slip. I wish Eliot had managed to find a successor, which, of course, would have been no small feat itself.

Volume 4 lacks the excitement of discovery found in the earliest prose and the wartime urgency of the middle years. Its pleasures are subtler.

Burnett's edition ultimately offers a rare opportunity to watch a major critic at work after the great battles have ended, an Eliotian epilogue. The portrait is distinguished, humane, and deeply learned. Few have expressed thoughts on literature with greater authority.