of expressing very abstract ideas with clearness and poetical force; as in the following lines :

"But with the Nameless is nor Day nor Hour;

Tho' we, thin minds, who creep from thought to thought,
Break into 'Thens' and ' Whens' the Eternal Now:
This double seeming of the single world!"

"Balin and Balan," the latest Idyll of the King, tells again how "Balin met with his brother Balan, and how each of them slew other unknowen till they were wounded to death." To many readers it will be hard to say whether the prose of Malory or the verse of the Poet Laureate has the greater charm of old association. This chapter of that great book of chivalry, which seems never to grow out of date, will be received with welcome by many for its own sake, and also for the sake of all the years during which its companions-all the Idylls of the King-have delighted the world.

Two books of poetry, which are uniform outwardly and in other ways related, are Mr. Dobson's "At the Sign of the Lyre,”* and Mr. Gosse's "Firdausi in Exile." They are books which every reader of poetry considers carefully and jealously, anxious for the reputation of the authors, and for the poetic fame of the age to which they belong. Much is expected of them. They have entered for the big prizes.

Mr. Dobson's volume can hardly be considered apart from his "OldWorld Idylls." Each book is a collection of earlier and later poems. Any general description of the one will apply equally well to the other. Both contain specimens of very various kinds of poetry, to the making of which go all sorts of poetic fancies. No one requires to be told how Mr. Dobson has discovered the quintessence of the eighteenth century-the Rosicrucian secret, to call up out of oblivion the brocades, and bows, and patches, even the voices and light laughter, of a careless Epicurean age. He delights to use this sort of magic. It is believed by some students that he has seen the real sedan-chair in itself, as it exists, apart from matter, in Plato's translunary paradise of ideas.

In the present volume he has given free range to bis wit. The world of Prior and Gay is revived in a score of graceful poems, which confer on the old thoughts and fashions of speech a charm greater than they ever possessed in their original life. For it must be confessed that Mr. Dobson, in spite of his partialities, is not really of the same school as the authors whom he admires. He has "the Passion of the Past"-to use an expression from the " Ancient Sage" of Lord Tennyson-in a degree which quite disqualifies him from ranking with the contented, worldly Augustan authors. His eighteenth century is a ghost, with all harsh colours softened, spiritualized, and shifting, like those of the aurora.

There are not in this present book quite so many Greek subjects as in "Old-World Idylls," but there is enough to surprise and confuse any reader who may have known Mr. Dobson only as a witty versifier on sentimental-comedy subjects. The poet, it is true, makes a humorous protest against the exclusive tyranny of the great masters, an apology for the poetry of Herrick and his fellows:

* "At the Sign of the Lyre." By Austin Dobson. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. 1886. +"Firdausi in Exile, and other Poems," By Edmund Gosse. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. 1885.

But the most casual reader can hardly fail to notice, besides the "Praed" or "Locker" passages, others of an austerer and loftier style. There is no enmity between the elegiac and the comic Muse. The memorial verses on pp. 100-106 should be studied. The poem on Victor Hugo is the answer or counterpart of "Jocosa Lyra."

Mr. Gosse's "Firdausi in Exile" is a worthy companion of Mr. Dobson's book. Not that there is much community of subject or style, though Mr. Gosse has caught the gait of the Augustans (see his "Epistle to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on his seventy-fifth birthday," p. 131). The likeness between the two poets is not much more than this, that they are equally scrupulous about the perfection of their writings. They both are "correct" poets, though not in the old sense of correctness. They claim, as moderns and disciples of the great Romantic poets, freedom in their choice of subject and of metre. They acknowledge the laws of no academy or arbiter of taste. with all their freedom they are intolerant of anything slack or flabby in composition. They never put forward "good intentions" as a plea to save themselves.

But

"Firdausi in Exile" and the poems that accompany it are examples. of careful and learned art. They command attention and admiration in virtue of the author's resolute endeavour after firmness and definiteness. Of the three longer poems, that of Firdausi is the best. It is a very eloquent narrative, which conveys to the reader a wonderful impression of Oriental vastness, spaciousness, and tranquillity. "The Island of the Blest" is far less pleasing. It gives, after Lucian's "True History," the story of a navigator's visit to the Happy Islands. The idea is a fascinating one. Unfortunately, Mr. Gosse has made a compromise between two inconsistent modes of treating the subject. Lucian treats the inhabitants of the Happy Islands with mischievous irreverence. A modern poet cannot take that method altogether-he cannot think of the Fairy Islands without a sort of half-humorous nostalgia. Mr. Gosse could not escape this sentiment-it makes all the beauty of his poem. Why did he not trust his instinct? Why did he determine to repeat Lucian's slanderous presentments of Ajax and Theseus, and even to add to them?-for Lucian knew better than to make his mob of blessed spirits hoot at Telamonian Ajax with the name of Cassandra. It was something less than generous in the poet to use this sort of invention. The poem has many beauties, but these things spoil it. In "The Cruise of the Rover," In "The Cruise of the Rover," a ballad of men of Devon and "the Mexique bay " and the Azores, another poem has been added to the company of those which acknowledge the "Revenge" as their captain. It is impossible in a short space to give any account of the great variety of imagination to be found in the shorter pieces

that follow. They need not fear to be compared with the earlier poems of the author. The following stanzas from "The Church by the Sea," are as convincing a proof of the author's mastery as could be found in any of the more elaborate metres in this collection :

:

The third series of Miss Ingelow's Poems is not less admirable than its predecessors. It begins with "Rosamund," a dramatic idyll of the Spanish Armada, in strong and vigorous blank verse-a poem full of energy. The second piece, "Echo and the Ferry," is surpassed by none in the book for that sort of excellence which belongs to Miss Ingelow's best pieces-that freedom of rhythm and rhyme which is found in the wonderful poem of the "High Tide"-which seems to come from perfect confidence that the poetic inspiration will find its proper words, tone, and measure. Verse of this sort seems almost to justify the heretics who disbelieve in the rules of the art of poetry. None of what may be called the more regular poems-those in set metres, such as the octaves of "The Bell-Bird"-have so much of the unmistakable indefinable charm of freshness and life as those where the author has been left free.

Mr. Bridges, whose "Prometheus the Firegiver" was noticed some time back in this REVIEW, has published a delightful version of the story of Psyche. † There are many things remarkable in it: the simplicity and evenness of the whole poem; the absence of anything to impair the interest of the story, as distinguished from the interest of characters or moral; the strongly original versification, with its old-fashioned and well-justified confidence in rhyme as the chief beauty. The simplicity of the poem is not, any more than Chaucer's, in any way insipid or merely innocent and ignorant. The poet can

"Poems." By Jean Ingelow. Third Series. Longmans.

"Eros and Psyche; a Poem in Twelve Measures." By Robert Bridges. The story done into English from the Latin of Apuleius. George Bell & Sons. 1885.

express (vi. 27) Newtonian, as Chaucer could Ptolemaic science. He can declare metaphysical subtleties-where that is necessary-not less courageously than Spenser (i. 5). In the more proper business of epic poetry he describes briefly and vividly, without any appearance of strained compression or over-emphasis. The following stanza is from the first "Measure" of the poem :

:

"And after them sad Melicertes drave

His chariot, that with swift unfellied wheel,
By his two dolphins drawn along the wave,
Flew as they plunged, yet did not dip nor reel,
But like a plough that shears the heavy land,
Stood on the flood, and back on either hand
O'erturned the briny furrow with its keel."

A new singer has appeared in the North. His name is Hugh Haliburton, a shepherd of the Ochils. His editor and sponsor is Mr. J. Logie Robertson, Master of Arts. This shepherd of Glendevon uses thoughts which his editor regards as Horatian, but his true literary ancestors are those of his own country. He has the Northern gift of humorous verse. He, too, belongs to the great society of which Dunbar and Burns are the equal sovereigns. He takes his style from Scottish tradition: he employs the metres of the poems "wrote by the ingenious before 1600," especially that old metre of Provence, invented (perhaps) by the Count of Poitiers in the eleventh century, passed on to England in the thirteenth, and saved by the Scottish poets out of the old mystery-plays to become the "crambo-clink" of Ramsay and his circle, of Fergusson and of Burns. Here is the youngest poet's non omnis moriar:

"When at my door the hearse draws up,
An' Kate haunds roun' the dirgy-cup,
Nae friend o' mine will tak' a sup
For that the less,

But calmly, wi' a steady grup,
Cowp owre his gless.

"The better part o' me remains:

Whaur Allan Water meets the plains,
An' Devon, crystal but for rains,

Gangs wanderin' wide,

Lang after me ye'll hear my strains
On Ochilside.'

But may it be long yet before he sings the swan-song!

A different sort of minstrelsy is to be heard in "Airs from Arcady;"† yet the two minstrels might agree on many things if they had a common language. The American poet is a follower of Epicurus in philosophy, and of Mr. Austin Dobson in style. His verse is always pleasant, and, in one poem at least, capable of more than an imitative

grace.

* "Horace in Homespun: a Series of Scottish Pastorals." By Hugh Haliburton, shepherd of the Ochils. With Preface, Notes, and Glossary, by J. Logie Robertson, M.A. Edinburgh: William Paterson. 1886.

+ "Airs from Arcady and Elsewhere." By H. C. Bunner. London: Charles Hutt.

In "An Italian Garden,"* Miss Robinson has collected a number of poems as different as can be from those of the "New Arcadia,” her last book of poetry. Most of the pieces in the "New Arcadia" were idylls or ballads; or, if lyrical, lyrics with a considerable alloy of historical or descriptive matter to harden them. These present poems are almost entirely destitute of epical substance. Among them there is no rival to the concise narrative poetry or the free romantic poetry of the "New Arcadia." They are all lyrics, and lyrics of the vaguest and most melancholy kind. It cannot be hoped for them that they will ever be widely known. Their grace cannot escape notice; but that is not enough to make their unsubstantial and subtle meaning acceptable with the majority. They are too fragmentary, too indefinite. They are not addressed to the wide world-to the guests that listen like a three years' child when the ballad-singer begins. Such simple persons must be content to wait-taking with them from this volume poems like "Florentine May," and " Fireflies," and praising the author for the Tuscan melodies-" Rispetti," "Stornelli," and "Strambotti” -here used with English words.

It may be noted here that Musurus Pasha has completed his translation of the "Divine Comedy." +

No record of last year's poetry would be complete without mention of the poems included in the "Literary Remains of C. S. Calverley," a book which forms no unworthy memorial of a writer remarkable in many ways, and not least for his infallible skill in all the secrets of

verse.

W. P. KER.

III.-GENERAL LITERATURE.

TRAVEL-Probably no Englishman knows Burma better than Mr. J. G. Scott ("Shway Yoe"), who was appointed the other day an Assistant-Commissioner of the country, mainly because of his exceptional knowledge of it; and all who want information about our new possessions and their interesting populations will read the little work he has just published on "Burma as it was, as it is, and as it will be." § It is an excellent description both of land and people, and is as readable as it is instructive.-Mr. H. H. Romilly puts forth his book on "The Western Pacific and New Guinea" with modesty, but it is really one of the most interesting books of travel we have read, and contains, small though it is, an unusual amount of fresh and novel information. The author is Deputy-Commissioner for the Western Pacific, and Acting Special Commissioner for New Guinea, and he has enjoyed many exceptionally good opportunities for seeing native life in that little-known island. He was spectator, for example, at a regular battle between two hostile native tribes, and afterwards at the scraping, cooking, and eating of some of the slain, and no special

"An Italian Garden: a Book of Songs." By A. Mary F. Robinson. T. Fisher Unwin. 1886. "Dante's Paradiso." Translated into Greek Verse. By Musurus Pasha, D.C.L. Williams & Norgate.

G. Bell & Sons.

1885.

London: G. Redway.

London: John Murray.