When Robertson Davies died last December, it wasn’t difficult to predict that posthumous work would soon begin to appear. The Merry Heart, which collects speeches and articles from the novelist’s last 15 years, is the first of two such volumes planned (a selection of Davies’ writings on music will follow sometime in the future).

If one thing is immediately evident from these selections, it is that Davies put all of his energy into his speaking engagements, whether asked to deliver a prestigious guest lecture or a 10-minute convocation address. As a result, this collection is a worthy complement to One Half of Robertson Davies, an earlier volume of speeches published in 1977. Inevitably there are some repeated anecdotes and phrases here, but it’s quite remarkable how few. Even when Davies raises the same idea in two or three different pieces, he always manages to find a fresh way of expressing it.

One does, however, get the feeling that there are some huge gaps in his knowledge. His diatribes against word processors are certainly a posture (Davies billed himself a “technomoron”), but it’s obvious he’s never really used a computer. He is also prone to making statements that suggest he hasn’t noticed the country has changed since the 1950s, arguing that “virtually all of us are descended from people who never wanted to go to Canada.”

There are several treasures here, such as Davies’ retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and “The McFiggin Fragment,” a satirical poke at literary scholarship. Davies the public speaker also sheds light on Davies the novelist, with some particularly interesting commentary on World of Wonders, the final volume of his Deptford Trilogy.

The editors have included relevant entries from Davies’ diary before most of the selections, which provide an interesting portrait of a modest, witty, extremely observant man. The introductions do, however, suffer from an overly reverent, obsequious tone. That is perhaps forgivable when treating an author of his stature, but one gets the feeling that such fawning would have taxed even Davies’ patience.