tistic skill in verse. It is singularly fortunate, however, that among our eminent modern poets Swinburne stands alone in this regard, widely separated, as he is, from Morris and Tennyson and the Brownings, as also from such of his contemporaries as Edwin Arnold and William Watson and Alfred Austin, a signal example of a literary monopolist in the abuse and misuse of special trusts and gifts.

As to the prose of Swinburne, it is not our purpose to write at length, as this part of his authorship is seen in his "Essays and Studies," "Miscellanies," "Studies in Prose and Poetry," and studies, respectively, of "Ben Jonson," "Victor Hugo," and "Shakespeare." It is, however, important and gratifying to state that he is in his prose often at his best, intellectually and ethically, and has made a valid contribution to British letters. Characteristically free, as the discussions themselves demand, from any overt violation of moral propriety, and pervaded by a clearly defined purpose to enlighten and stimulate his readers, they serve to institute an amount of difference between the poet and prose writer rarely seen in literary annals, and not at all in those of England. Despite the most conspicuous faults of his prose,

a degree of undue ornament, and an over-statement and verboseness, and one-sided judgments, his various essays and studies well deserve the attention of every student of our vernacular literature. Some of our best critics see no evidence of lasting fame in the poetry of Swinburne, and assign it well down in the secondary order of English verse. A more generous criticism regards our author as "the foremost of the younger school of British poets," the exponent of "another cycle of creative song." In determining, therefore, the rightful status of such a poet, it must first be clearly ascertained just what we mean by poetry. If it consists in the emotive and æsthetic only, Swinburne's place is assured among the best of bards. If it involve, also, high creative function and philosophic imagination, his rank must be lower. The test is just here. A careful study of his poetic work will show us, as we have suggested, that he writes upon the level of sentiment and structure rather than upon that of original conception and ideal. There is here, therefore, a clear limitation of range. Not only has he written no epic, but could not, in so far as we can see, successfully have produced one, any more than Burns could have done so. He lacks the epic reach and

function, though some critics have strongly insisted that they detect in his verse an epic feature and ability. He finds his province and his limit within the lyric, idyllic, and semi-dramatic. If he has, in a sense, succeeded as a dramatist in "Atalanta" and "Bothwell," he has failed in other dramatic attempts, and sufficiently often to mark the absence of that sustained histrionic power which indicates the master. As already suggested, it is in prose criticism and description, as in his "Study of Shakespeare," that his mental powers find their fullest exercise. If confined, however, to his poetry, we must assign him to the second group of nineteenth-century authors, by reason of his failure in the line of the inventive and constructive. There is no "faculty divine," no wide dramatic outlook, no profound lyric note, nothing of that Dantean order whose native air is among things supernal and inspiring. We find in Swinburne an exquisite artist of what Sidney Lanier has called, the science of verse.

cacy of taste and finish, form, art.

We find lyric feeling, delitone and touch-in a word, Swinburne is a litterateur in the South-European sense of the term; an exponent of harmony and poetic culture; a stylist in verse. Just to the degree in which the poetic drift of the age

is toward verbal affluence and æsthetic elegance of phrase and line, he may be said to be in sympathy with it, as he is also unfortunately in sympathy with it just to the degree in which the philosophic and religious drift is toward indifferentism and the bold negation of fundamental truth. To the degree, however, in which the poetic drift is toward a broad and high intellectual outlook, and the philosophic and religious drift is toward evangelical faith, or what Mr. Balfour calls the foundations of belief, his verse is out of touch with his time, and cannot minister to us in the hours of our deepest needs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold's Essays in Criticism.

Austin's Poetry of the Period.

Bagehot's Literary Studies (Vol. II).

Bardoe's Browning's Message to His Time.

Beers's English Romanticism in the Eighteenth

Century.

Burrell's Johnson.

Burrell's Obiter Dicta (Vol. I).

Calvin's Life of Keats.

Carruther's Life of Pope.

Chesterton's Browning.

Cooke's Poets and Problems.

Corson's Introduction to the Study of Browning.

Courthope's Life in Poetry.

Devey's Modern English Poets.

Dowden's Modern Period of English Literature.

Dowden's Primer of Shakespeare.

Dowden's Shakespeare's Mind and Art.

Gosse's From Shakespeare to Pope.

Hallam's Literary History.

Hase's Miracle Plays.

Hazlitt's Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.

Hunt's Literature: Its Principles and Problems.

Hutton's (R.H.) Essays (Vol. II).

Ingram's Life of Mrs. Browning.