We will not mar the effect of the lyric dialogue which merges the horror of the catastrophe in a dirge-like relief. Its conception and execution are equally beautiful. From the dying Meleager comes no reproach even to the end: the thought that she who had made had the right also to unmake him plays in his fading fancy, and then it comes on him that death was mixed with all his life, and that it is this law that slays him, and not my mother at all.' At the last he turns to Atalanta, in a solemn desire that she should hide his body with her veil, and be pitiful as thou art maiden perfect; and passes away with the prayer:

6

'And now for God's sake kiss me once or twice,

And let me go: for the night gathers me,

And in the night shall no man gather fruit.'

These extracts, without further comment, would, we believe, be a sufficient guarantee for the singular merit of this poem to most persons of poetical taste and sentiment. It is evidently

the produce, not of the tender lyrical faculty which so often waits on sensitive youth and afterwards fades into the light of common day, nor even of the classical culture of which it is itself a signal illustration, but of an affluent and apprehensive genius, which, with ordinary care and fair fortune, will take a foremost place in English literature. The book presents itself to us with the bold front of a work of Art, and makes no appeals to our compassion or sentimentality. It asks for none of the allowances we freely give to the utterances of young hope and ready fancy, or to the expression of thoughts in themselves so pure and generous that we are content to let them pass for poetry with no severe test of their æsthetic claims. It encumbers itself with all the difficulties of a form that has become archaic, and of an order of thought which professes to teach no living interests and to represent a dead and alien faith. It risks much to win largely, and does not spare to shock the many to charm the instructed few. Therefore, while we, in a great degree, admit the pretension, we are bound to warn the poet of what seem to us to be the dangers of his intellectual position and the impediments to the literary triumphs which otherwise await him.

When we say that this poem exhibits a defective moral tone, we do not intend to discuss any metaphysical or theological theory, but plainly to reprove the historical and artistic view it presents of the relations of the personages of the drama to the invisible world. That the problem of Evil, the mystery of sorrow, the contradictions of life, weighed heavily on the old Greek mind, and constituted much of the pathos of their legends and

their literature, is undeniable, but we shall look in vain for any precedent for the naked defiance of the Supreme, the bitter and angry anti-theism, which is here represented as the ruling passion. It is true that this feeling has its place in the aberrations of the human mind, savage or cultivated; and that it has been the business of most theologies to counteract or to crush it, while some have indirectly tended to its encouragement. In the fetichism of the African chief and in the despair of the poet Cowper, in the devil-worship of India and in the ' reprobation' of Jonathan Edwards, there is, at root, the same deification of the spirit of Evil, to which the weak man deploringly submits, and which the strong man challenges in vain. But this conception was not Greek, and it is not poetical. We will not admit the example of the Eschylean Prometheus; he is the God conquered in the war of Gods; he is of the old legitimate sovereigns of creation, overcome by the new and rebellious powers. It is true that Hellenic mythology recognised the ultimate Destinies, implacable, uncontrollable, to which the Gods themselves were subject; but to make these powers capricious, cruel, delighting in the miseries of mankind, conscious contrivers of suffering, is a mere debauch of fancy. Assuredly no such notion as this would have darkened the gay Greek supernatural world, in which the agents of power themselves underwent nearly as many troubles, anxieties, passions, and reverses, as the human creatures under their influence, and with whom they held relations far more like those of benevolent or mischievous fairies than of cruel ogres or blood-thirsty tyrants. Their very üßpis was a kind of sympathetic jealousy,their Nemesis a salutary control over human pride. Possibly in some of the Mysteries there may have existed traces of a dæmon-worship, which would have for its reverse a defiance of the supreme evil power; but the Greek Chorus should represent public opinion and not the secret deliberations of fanatics or philosophers. We do not scruple to add that this conception of the nature of things is unpoetical from its monotonous, fixed, final character. Without hope and free-will, imagination stiffens into madness; and there is no student of the fate of the genius of Lord Byron who will not recognise the injurious effect of this order of thought on his poetical career, counteracted as it was by the varieties of his experience as a man of the world. Mr. Swinburne must set before himself some other philosophical idea than Manfred with a distinction, if he intends to occupy much place in the minds of the present generation of Englishmen.

But with all this misapprehension, it is something to get a

poem which sedulously aims at being a whole in action and in art, and not a mere series of emotional expressions. The popular poetry of our age is not only subjective, but it prides itself in representing in the most varied manner the details of individual consciousness. Dr. Dodd, writing Prison-thoughts' in Newgate, with the halter round his neck, for the excitement of the town, was not a very edifying spectacle, but it is the image of the present condition of much of our poetic literature Every poet seems to look on himself as a penitent, and on the public as his legitimate confessor. Nor can we hope that this incessant repetition of ordinary sentiments and reflections will be arrested until men come to understand that the mere circumstance of putting a thought or a fact into a metrical form does not in the least affect its value or its condition-that whatever is commonplace, frivolous, and dull remains so, however melodious its utterance; and that if we persist in regarding a poem more as a psychological phenomenon than as a plastic representation, the interest and the merit will soon cease to be poetical at all, and Pegasus will be degraded into a packhorse for conventional or paradoxical moralities.

Till we see what Mr. Swinburne can do in some other field, we cannot fairly gauge his faculties; but both from the design and the execution of the performance before us, we have no reason to fear that he will lose by transferring his imagination to modern scenes and impersonations. But he has to guard against that insolence of originality which affronts and deters the reader, and which therefore, however justified in the author's mind by his own canons, either of Art or Nature, can carry with it no adequate advantage, and he will do well to restrain that exuberance of language and imagery which has the double defect of often confusing or drowning the thought, and of inducing the poet to content himself with presenting the same image in varieties of words so accumulated as to convey the impression of poverty of ideas.

Having already alluded to the first of these faults, we might here have something to say of the purely literary defects of the production. We acquit Mr. Swinburne of any voluntary obscurity; indeed we see his sense of the worth of simplicity in the circumstance that in his most passionate and energetic moments the language is the clearest. Nevertheless, either from a collocation of words which perhaps seems plain to himself but which it requires time for the reader's mind to take up and redistribute in a more ordinary succession, or from the assumption that every ellipse which the writer's consciousness imperceptibly supplies is equally facile to every recipient of the

thought-many persons, whose intelligence he would be the last to disregard, find obscurity and even serious difficulty of comprehension in the diction of many passages. We say advisedly in the diction, for his abstinence from all overdrawn conceits is remarkable in a young poet of any time, and his careful avoidance of the shadowy border-land of metaphysics and poetry in which so many versifiers of our own day take refuge from the open scrutiny of critical sunlight deserves full praise and recognition. It is probable that a strict supervision over the combinations of his fancy is the best remedy for him to trust to, and it is a proud and pleasant reflection that if his fruit be somewhat hidden, it is by the abundance of his own foliage.

To some severer students than ourselves, this wealth of illustration and imagery seriously damages the classical integrity of the poem. If, however, Mr. Swinburne has succeeded in preserving so much of the old Hellenic character that the sense is rather of difference than of incongruity, is this not an additional evidence of the enduring power these ancient master-pieces of form exercise over minds and times the most distinctive from the elements of their own production? With the exception of the Iphigenia' of Göthe, all modern adaptations of the Greek drama which have taken any hold on the world, have mainly succeeded by applications, sometimes the most heterogeneous, of the old world to the new. The strongest example is of course the French theatre, which retained little beyond the shell of traditionary names and a certain supposed analogy of sentiments; and yet it would be bold to assert that Racine and Corneille would have gained by the absence of the classic models. The truth is that modern literature does not want mere imitations, however ingenious, of these magnificent monuments; but that is no reason why they should not continue to sway and people the imagination of the world, and supply, out of their storehouse of beautiful and majestic fable, inexhaustible materials for the delineation of human passion, and the various developments of the higher instincts of mankind.

ART. IX.-Letters from Egypt, 1863-65. By Lady DUFF GORDON. London: 1865.

EGYPT, at the commencement of the present century, was almost as unknown and mysterious as her own hieroglyphics. If we except the Arabic histories and descriptions open only to the learned in that recondite language, Herodotus was our most recent authority. Egypt, possessing the highest interest to the historian and the divine, was scarcely as much known to Europe as the wilds of Tartary. Napoleon first broke the spell of mystery that held the land, and the celebrated commission of the French Institute, headed by Dénon, accompanied the armies which fought beside the Pyramids. Then followed Bruce, Belzoni, Niebuhr, Burckhardt; all of whom did good work towards disinterring Egypt from the sands of its deserts, and removing the obstacles raised by Mohammedan intolerance and apathy. At length, about the year 1825, a small party of Englishmen met in Cairo, living among the people like Copts or Arabs, and patiently studying the manners and customs both of ancient and modern Egypt. Two of that party were Wilkinson and Lane, one of whom exhausted the ancient people, the other, with inimitable accuracy, the modern Egyptians.

Such was our acquaintance with the land of the Pharaohs, of Joseph, and of Moses, when five-and-twenty years ago, a line of steampackets to Alexandria threw open the country to pleasureseekers and health-seekers. The Nile soon superseded the Rhine for a fashionable tour, and we have been inundated, not by its fertilising waters, but by a flood of books about Egypt, of which it may be generally said that they have done little to increase our knowledge of the antiquities of the country, nothing whatever to make us better acquainted with its people. We know no more at the present day of the inhabitants, of their feelings and tastes, their human sympathies and religious hopes, than we did before the stream of tourists set Nilewards. True, Mr. Lane may be said to have done all that can be done in the way of describing that people; but the Modern Egyptians' is not intended to give us every-day experience of life in Egypt-rather the results of that experience. Even the brilliant pages of Eōthen, of Miss Martineau, and those of two or three other writers, afford us little insight into the inner life of the Egyptian. Nor is the cause far to seek. A foreign people cannot be understood in a short, and generally hurried, visit; nor indeed can they be appreciated by the oldest resident,