My old classmates at the University of Malta, who like me had the good fortune of being taught by Professor M.H. Abrams, a visiting Fulbright professor from Cornell University, in the 1952-53 academic year might wish to know that he died last year at the great age of 102.

Abrams was a great scholar who specialised in the literature of the Romantic period. In the year he had finished delighting his Maltese students with his wit and erudition, 1953, he published what would become one of the seminal books on Romantic literature, The Mirror and the Lamp, which has long been acknowledged as having revolutionised critical attitudes to the literature of the period and a long time after. He published many other works, many of them also influential, but it is by this work that he is still most strongly remembered.