`Browning really comes back to life in the marvellous third volume of the new Oxford Browning', wrote John Bayley, choosing it as one of his Books of the Year for 1988. While Volume III included six of the eight Bells and Pomegranates pamphlets, the present volume completes the series and includes the most remarkable of all, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. Here we find `Pictor Ignotus', `The Lost Leader', `The Bishop orders his Tomb', `The Laboratory', `The Boy and the Angel', and the first part of `Saul'. Also included are Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and the essay on Shelley. As the Times Literary Supplement reviewer of the earlier volumes commented, `readers of a poet like this need all the help they can get; and Jack and Smith have provided it in abundance.' Each poem is fully annotated, and accompanied by a detailed introduction which provides information on the chronology of composition and on Browning's sources.

This volume contains six of the eight Bells and Pomegranates, modestly-priced pamphlets published by Edward Moxon in a bid to help Browning recover from the ridicule which greeted the first appearance of Sordello. It includes Pippa Passes, four other dramatic works, and Dramatic Lyrics, the first of the great collections of short poems with which Browning established his reputation. In addition, a version of a poem on the Pied Piper by Browning's father is here printed for the first time. All significant textual variants are recorded, and each of the Bells is accompanied by an introduction and by full annotation. New information throws further light on this most important period in Browning's poetic career.