books, and is fascinated by them, will like to believe, and will find it easy to believe. To my mind, the figure of this man has a grace and charm which belong to only one or two in the whole history of our literature-to Sir Philip Sidney, to Edmund Spenser, to Joseph Addison; his memory, like theirs, is of sweet savour, his name, like theirs, of sweet sound. Through all the controversies of his time he passed with temper unruffled, with mind unclouded and serene; he worked hard, harder by far than most men, yet, in his own fine phrase, his toil was ever 'unsevered from tranquillity.' And so we seem to see him, with that lofty brow and look of serene triumph, passing away in the consciousness that he had laboured for ideals that were lofty and true, that he had guided his own course well, and helped others to guide their course well also, that to the best of his power he had borne his part in the attempt the necessary, the noble attempt-to usher in a type of man, 'more intelligent, more gracious, and more humane.'

A. C. SWINBURNE1

I

THE last seven years have seen three great lights of later English poetry go out one by one. In 1888 Matthew Arnold, that fine genius who had shed so clear and steady a radiance over wide tracts of thought and feeling, died four years before he had attained the allotted span of threescore and ten. Robert Browning followed next, leaving behind him a mass of the richest poetic ore, imbedded, alas! in the roughest quartz, and requiring the vigorous use of pick and spade in order to be come at. Last of all, in the ripe fulness of his years, but in the unabated exercise of powers which seemed ever to be gaining new breadth and vigour, Alfred Tennyson was taken from us, with an exquisitely beautiful swan-song on his dying lips. To those who value the great traditions of English song, it seemed as though the poetic sky was 'dispeopled now and void,' as though with the removal of these three great

1 President's Essay to the Heriot-Watt College Literary Society, October 1895.

figures we declined upon a race of lesser men. I do not know that we were greatly consoled when Mr. Traill came forward with his list of fifty minor poets-an allowance of the bread perhaps rather more than adequate. But when the first shock of their lamented deaths was over, we began to reflect with thankfulness that though much was taken much was left, and that we had still in our midst one or two poets not unworthy to be ranked but a little below the great men who had passed. Mr. William Morris, indeed, has long since forsaken the banner of the Muses to hold aloft the red flag of Socialism; but Mr. Swinburne remains faithful to his art, and still pours out his exuberant vitality with the same force and freshness as of old. It is of this singer, in whom all competent judges recognise the only successor of the late Laureate, that I wish to write with what measure of power I possess.

It is almost exactly thirty years since Mr. Swinburne dazzled and enchanted the reading public with his first great poem. There are poets who go from strength to strength, to whom the years bring a deeper and wider vision, and a richer and more significant music, poets whom we begin by calling exquisite and end by calling sublime; of these, the most highly favoured sons of Apollo, Shakespeare is the standing example.

There are others who concentrate their best work within a few crowded years of their life, and who in the periods on either side of this glorious harvest-time produce work infinitely inferior: Wordsworth will occur to every one as a notable representative of this less favoured order. There are poets who seem to shoot up all at once to maturity, and who never afterwards rise greatly above or sink greatly below the high level to which they had at first attained. It is to this class that Mr. Swinburne indubitably belongs. If we set aside poems so obviously unripe, though in parts of great beauty and abundant promise, as the Queen-Mother and Rosamond, and regard Atalanta in Calydon as the first exquisite fruit of his mature Muse, then we are forced to say that Mr. Swinburne has never done anything better, if indeed he has done anything quite so perfect, as this poetic drama, which he published in 1864 at the age of twenty-seven. This fact would of itself absolve me from the necessity of following the chronological order of his works, since the sole advantage of that method in the eyes of all save pedants lies in the clue it affords to the growth and development of an author's genius. Mr. Swinburne, besides, has been so fertile that it would be impossible for me, within my limits, to make much more than bare mention

of all his works. I must content myself, therefore, with a very general survey of his poetry. This very copiousness is often urged against Mr, Swinburne as a reproach; and there is a sense in which the complaint has some shadow of justification. It is important, however, to see clearly what that sense is. No one will be so foolish as to say that fecundity in itself is other than a virtue, as the sign of a soil naturally rich and exuberant. When a writer is culpably careless, when he produces a vast mass of work, much of which is slovenly, slipshod, down-at-heel, we may indeed reasonably wish that he had written less, and taken more pains to make it perfect. Byron in poetry and Scott in prose undoubtedly lay themselves open to this charge. Wordsworth, again, is a poet who pays the penalty of over-copiousness by being often dull, prolix, flatly prosaic. Now, Mr. Swinburne can certainly be charged with neither of these sins. He is copious, but he is never careless; the artistic instinct is so deeply ingrained in his nature, that we may be sure no work ever leaves his hand until it is as perfect in its kind as he can make it. Undeniably prosaic, again, he never is; the bogs and marshes and flat, shifting sands of Wordsworth's worst work have no counterpart in Mr. Swinburne's poetry.

What, then, do Mr. Swinburne's critics mean