WE all love Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas. We love the words, we love the music, and we don't know which we love more. Of the two collaborators Gilbert has been regarded as the one who had the larger share in the creation of the Gilbert and Sullivan plays, for he not only wrote the words but inspired the music. It was Gilbert's genial, witty, satiric, and cleverly rhymed librettos that brought out the best musical talent of Sullivan. Gilbert has been called the English Aristophanes, but who of us cares for a description? We all know what The Mikado, The Gondoliers, The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, and the rest of them are like.

Strange to say, these unique classics have so far remained inaccessible to the general public. In including Gilbert's plays in the Modern Library, the publishers believe that they are fulfilling an elementary want of the great body of American readers.