seriousness of approach towards the highest is apt to work hesitancy and a want of precision, sometimes even of courage and candour. There are few minds in the whole history of literature that have been equal to this test. A little ripple of laughter, however restrained, evades the difficulty, and leaves success complete. Of Maud,' in spite of its many beauties, we had rather not say much. It has been called its author's masterpiece. After much reflection, we take leave to doubt this. Its subject is needlessly disagreeable. Its hero provokes no sympathy; its heroine is a phantom, a statue for Pygmalion to write verses to. The brother and the lordling are unfair caricatures. It is immortalised by some exquisite fragments, such as the garden song, the apostrophe to the Swainston cedar, many lines of the song that begins 'Oh, that 'twere possible 'After long grief and pain,' and the nautilus. But it is defaced by metres here and there that are positively ugly, and by satire that is unexciting because too often undeserved. Of Tennyson perhaps the last word to say is this: Outside and below the group of the very grandest, he is the most perfect and companionable of poets, and will be remembered by an unusual quantity of his work. He will stand for ever in the history of English literature as the champion who refound and rescued the lost Lady of Style. His aim was always lofty; he never wrote a line, much less conceived a poem, that should express himself at the expense of his readers. He never laughed, at or with society, the laugh which corrupts while it affects to censure. It was not in him to gloze over the commonplaces of lust, or to elaborate the portraiture of great crimes with a halfconcealed admiration; he could never have written his own apology, or excused his readers' fascination as did the author of Monsieur de Camors' when he bade farewell to his adulterous traitor and suicide with the words, Sans doute un grand coupable, mais qui pourtant 'fut un homme.' No Cencis,' no 'Beppos,' no 'Don 'Juans' for him; though perhaps he did spend too much time over the episode of Launcelot and Guinevere, and though his fame would not have suffered if he had abstained from the somewhat namby-pamby love-making of Rosamund and Henry. Let us forget these blemishes of substance, with here and there a false experiment in form; they are but a few specks in the crop of rich fruit which the garden of his soul has borne for the world; let us turn them lovingly to the bottom of the basket. The poetry of the

nineteenth century culminated in him, and, fitly, in the very noontide of its own course. He may be said, in his own words,

To sit a star upon the sparkling spire,'

and there is none to dispute his throne with him.

Side by side and almost year for year with the great laureate there was working a man whose genius was at once the contrast and a complement of his own. Browning's method was not so much a negative lack of style as a positive rejection of it. His magnificent imagination, his intellectual force, his instinct for a fine subject, his love for and mastery over landscape, his penetration into the devious passages and closed chambers of human nature, are all undoubted; but so are his wilfulness, his roughness, his unliterary avoidance of simplicity, his love of leaving his reader, and perhaps sometimes himself, lost in half-lights of intention, and half-thridded mazes of unexpounded philosophy. His burliness and muscularity found acceptance with many persons not too capable of appreciating his highest qualities, but who fancied that they had found in him satisfaction for a lack of virility which they had imputed to Tennyson simply because he was delicate and clear. Many such mistook his obscurity itself for profundity, thinking that what they could not plumb must needs be deep. A host of the admirers of Sordello' irresistibly recall that old Northumbrian story of the night-wanderer who stumbled into one of the hundreds of disused shafts in the mining district, but, managing to catch hold of the bank as he fell, maintained himself with foot and hand, shouting the while for help. He is said to have been dragged out shaking and chattering in his agony; and it was found that, had he but known it, his toes were only a few inches from the bottom. But Browning must not be undervalued because silly folk have raved about him. He will pass his immortality in the company of his great rival and contemporary; propped, it may be, upon a somewhat lower bed of amaranth or moly, though very close at hand. Because nonsense has been talked about 'Para'celsus' we need not forget Strafford,'Pippa Passes,' Saul,' 'Rabbi ben Ezra,' 'How they brought the good news 'from Ghent to Aix,' and, above and beyond all else of his, large or small, the matchless and priceless Ring and the 'Book.' But great as he was he cannot be wholly forgiven, even by the most grateful of us, for the perversity which elected to scorn the use of good handicraft in the shaping of

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fine thought. Whoever the jeweller may be, he has no right to set diamonds in mud.

At Browning's own side for many years sat and wrote his gifted but artistically deficient wife. The long romance of their joint lives, and the unquestioning worship of her husband, threw for a while an undue lustre upon the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The chastisement inflicted upon a still living critic, who at the time of her death indulged himself with a flippant remark in violation of good taste and feeling, but which is not now more worthy of repetition than it was originally of punishment, is still remembered by the readers of Pacchiarotto.' The voice of the militant husband is silent now, but we may express the verdict of a later generation without irreverence or cowardice on the one hand, or the risk of undeserved affront on the other. A love of paradox in the reading public contributed to the undue esteem in which, at one time, the productions of the poetess were held. It pleased people to say that the grey mare was the better horse. We remember these very words in the pages of an eminent Review. But though it was ludicrous to look upon Mrs. Browning as the rival or superior of her greater husband, her claims to consideration are beyond cavil. She had feeling, romance, wit, picturesqueness, thoughtfulness occasionally rising into wisdom, and landscape; but none of these qualities was hers in a superlative degree. Aurora Leigh' exhibits her range and her limitations. It is a novel in verse, yet its story is undigested and improbable, and its incidents are so overlaid with that intellectual gossip to which both she and her husband were regrettably prone, that it is next to impossible to pick them out as one goes along. They are jerked in as though she were on the point of forgetting them, and as if they were things only worth mentioning, as it were, by the way. The narrative portion of the poem does not occupy ten per cent. of its dimensions. The rest is made up of reflections, sometimes excellent, but in the main tedious and trite. The plot is rather like a story by George Eliot, but a story whose every merit the novelist would have transcended, and from the absurdities and crudities of which she would have steered clear. The worst poetic defect of Aurora Leigh is its abominable versification. From its long stretch of some eleven thousand lines one might bring forward a hundred examples. In fact, her artistic taste was Mrs. Browning's weakest point. Her lyric metres are often as faulty as her blank verse. They jingle themselves at times

into something very like vulgarity. Their music is that of the guitar or the harp at their best; at their worst it is that of the banjo. Yet she must have read the best models. Shelley and, later on, Tennyson were at her command; but she must have turned from them without true study. Perhaps she loved to imitate her husband's perversities. Perhaps he encouraged her he would certainly not correct her-and she still remained under the expiring lyric tastelessness of the generation that preceded her. Still, with all her shortcomings in art she was a grand manifestation of a woman who revered womanhood, and who conceived that her mission was to hold up the best in it at once as a standard for her own sex, and as a plea and protest to ours. So let us forgive much that is weak, much that is rough, much that is even tawdry if looked at from the artistic side alone. She was voluminous beyond measure, and, like some of her betters in the craft, would probably have written much better if she had written far less. One would have been glad to rub out some twenty thousand of her lines, and then to set her to work to polish and chasten the rest.

With Browning and Mrs. Browning we take leave of the two last great sinners against style. Tennyson, Patmore, Arnold, and Swinburne have all been thoroughly conscientious in form, phrase, and general workmanship. Arnold may have been dry and without a large stock of melodies; Patmore over-frugal and over-chastened; the trill of Swinburne exuberant, repetitive, over-prolonged. But with all of them their strings are ever in tune, and they never touch their instrument with a slack or slovenly hand. As to Arnold, we have heard it said by many folk that to them his work was altogether satisfying; but the remark has generally been made by those who have had an undoubted cross of the prig in them. There is a staid manliness of thought, a carefully pruned nicety of expression everywhere. In 'Thyrsis' and 'The Scholar Gipsy' there is a note struck of honest love and genuine regret. But the magical power of grief-begetting grief, the poignancy which stabs while the verse enchants, the haunting lights and shadows of a suggested passion which hold the memory enslaved, are not there. One can set down anything of Arnold's with a This is uncommonly good,' and that is fatal. It may be urged that something of this sort is true even of Milton's Lycidas.' If so, it springs of a common artificiality. But then Lycidas' is ablaze with lines that have an immortality and perfection of their own, apart from the amber in which

they are embedded. There is nothing of that sort in Thyrsis' or 'The Scholar Gipsy,' and they are Arnold at his best.

Of Clough much has been written because more has been felt. To a large group of friends who mourned his comparatively early death his poems were made sacred by memory. They loved his work as they had loved him. But to us, who come to a view of him when the mists of regret have floated away, a colder and soberer judgement appears the truer. He was a dweller upon the borderland of genius, and intellectually was picturesque, but unkempt, like the landscape of the moor edges. Earnest and humorous, and, if unpolished, altogether manly and genuine, his figure suggests that of a respectable Salvator Rosa, or, to take a modern parallel from prose fiction, of a Warrington who wrote verse. He was inexpert alike in form and diction. He had no more mastered his vehicle than he had tamed his intellect. He held neither of them in hand. His difficulties in art were exactly mated to the perplexities of a soul in flux. But he belongs to the 'living minds' of the century, and he exemplifies its variety, even if he has not contributed much to its achievement.

Of such writers as Aubrey de Vere and Sir Henry Taylor it would be impossible for any lover of good literature to speak without respect. Sir Henry Taylor's noble poem Philip van Artevelde' in its day almost took the world by storm; but neither that play nor Edwin the Fair' has retained its hold upon the reading public. As with De Vere's 'Alexander the Great' and St. Thomas of Canter'bury' the poet failed in the instinct to make choice of topics which seize. We do not, however, place these works upon the same plane; each of Sir Henry Taylor's rising to a height not attained, and possessing an attractiveness not shared, by either of the other two. The Irish chronicles which Mr. de Vere so laboriously put into verse are but dreary reading, and he further fails to make interesting the Medieval Records or the Legends of Saxon Saints. This, perhaps, may be owing to the Roman Catholicism which can provoke at best only sectarian sympathy. The workmanship, however, is always good, and is always that of a cultivated gentleman. Some of his smaller pieces and sonnets are gems which for years to come will brighten the pages of many an anthology.

The excursions of Charles Kingsley into verse were so infrequent, and the total result of them so small, that, but for