have regretted that Desmond MacCarthy invited Lucas to review modern poetry, one of them declaring Lucas "a disastrous choice" for a Waste Land review. (Disastrous, that is, for the journal's avant-garde image.) After 1923, though attacking obscurantism in general terms, Lucas largely ignored Eliot's poetry, aside from a retrospective dig in 1942 at 'The Hollow Men' ("hollow men whimpering under prickly pear trees, conceited still amid their grovellings because a prickly pear remains an exotic and highly intellectual plant" ) and at 'Sweeney among the Nightingales' ("the nightingales of Aeschylus now exhibit to a ravished public their 'droppings'; for to the sewer all things are sewer" ). On the later Eliot he was silent. He had no time for mystical poetry, regarding religion as an aberration of the human mind. In 1928 Lucas had been stung by Eliot's review in the Times Literary Supplement criticising aspects of the Introduction to his Webster. He replied vigorously in the same journal, only to find Eliot extending his criticisms in another review in The Criterion. Lucas counter-attacked in his 1929 essay 'Modern Criticism', ridiculing Eliot's literary-critical obiter dicta and oracular tone. In later impressions of his essays, Eliot made minor changes or added clarifications to sentences Lucas had ridiculed, and praised the textual and historical scholarship of the 1927 Webster. Lucas left the Introduction out of his 1958 revised editions of the two major plays, but demand for the unabridged 1927 Webster continued, and it was reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic in 1966. Reputation Lucas's standing as a literary critic was probably at its highest in the 1930s. "In three respects," wrote the Times Literary Supplement in 1934, "Lucas rises pre-eminent from the crowd of contemporary critics: in his care for style, for dignity and grace in his method of presentment: in his learning in the literature of several languages: and in the balance, the sanity of his judgment." Post-war, reviewers were often more hostile. Many post-war reviews amounted to reprisals by the Leavisite camp: "There is an air of breezy Bloomsbury superficiality and cultural omniscience about this book that is distressing," wrote one. "His is the type of over-cultivated fuddy-duddy mind that has done – and is doing – great damage to our whole culture in general and to literary appreciation in particular." Probably because, psychoanalytic literary criticism aside, Lucas scorned most new trends – he described the critical theory