Opening the second series of the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures, Professor Eric R. D. Maclagan, C.B.E., F.S.A., A.R.I.B.A., Director and Secretary of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, will deliver tonight his first lecture on the History of Italian Sculpture.

This address, the topic of which will be "The Approach to Italian Sculpture," will be given at 8 o'clock in the large Lecture Hall of the New Fogg Museum, and will be open to the public.

Professor Maclagan, who is an authority on mediaeval art, became a member of the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1905, soon after his graduation from Oxford.

Served in Foreign Office

Entering the British Foreign Office in 1916, he served with distinction in the field of diplomacy throughout the World War. He was transferred to the Ministry of Information and became head of the British Information Bureau in Paris in 1916, rising two years later to the position of Controller for France.

At the completion of the War, he was attached to the British Peace Delegation to Paris in 1919, and on his return to London after the Treaty of Versailles, became Deputy Keeper of the Department of Architecture and Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

After holding this office for three years, from 1921 to 1924, Professor Maclagan was made Director and Secretary of the Museum, which office he now fills.

In the ten Norton lectures which Professor Maclagan is to give this winter, he will render a comprehensive and unified account of Italian sculpture of the Middle Ages, starting with an introduction leading up to Romanesque sculpture and the Pisani School.

The remaining lectures will take place on the following evenings at 8 o'clock: November 9; November 16, November 30, December 7, February 8, February 15, February 29, March 7, and March 14.