of the 1950s as "largely pseudo-scientific bubble-blowing" – his criticism has long been out of fashion and is mostly out of print. "The literary world has passed on," wrote L. P. Wilkinson, "but that does not mean that what supervened was better; and just because of his uncompromising brilliance the whirligig of time may bring in his criticism again. His Style (1955) has a permanent value in any case, unaffected by trends." His two earliest books, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922) (his Fellowship dissertation) and Euripides and His Influence (1923), not yet superseded in similar concise form, continue to be reprinted. The editors of the new Cambridge Webster (1995–2007) praise "his customary accuracy and astuteness" in matters of dating, authorship, and textual scholarship. "With its voluminous and marvellously wide-ranging notes," writes D. C. Gunby, "Lucas's four-volume, old-spelling edition remains essential reading for those who love scholarship and, more, love the plays of John Webster". Verse translation Lucas dedicated much of his time to making classical (mainly Greek) poetry accessible through verse translations. His companion volumes Greek Poetry for Everyman (1951) and Greek Drama for Everyman (1954) contain some 20,000 lines. No single translator had attempted before to bring together in homogeneous volumes so much of the best of Greek poetry from Homer to the 6th century A.D., with the introductions and notes needed by the non-classicist. The translations were praised for their grace and fidelity – "the sense and the imagery are minutely reproduced" – and were hailed by the press as Cambridge's single-handed answer to the [collaborative] Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation. Reviewers of the first volume, Greek Poetry, generally preferred his translations of lyric, Alexandrian and later poetry to the 7,000 rhymed lines from Homer, which were omitted from the second edition (Everyman Library, 1966). Of the second volume, Greek Drama, a reviewer wrote: "Lucas makes the plays deceptively easy to read and appreciate by smoothing away the austerities and complexities of the Greek – qualities which some modernists conscientiously preserve or even exaggerate." "His translations have no striking originality of style," commented A. H. Coxon, "but they are accurate, graceful, and dignified, and they have the merit of not veiling the Greek, so that for long stretches the poetic quality of the original shines through." The translation of Hippolytus remains in print in the Penguin selection, Eight Great Tragedies, ed. Sylvan Barnet. Lucas's 1960 essay