and 'Don Juan.' In the first, fine passages; in the second, a brilliant whole.

Moreover, there is something else which has rarely been fully allowed for in discussions of the famous text about a good sonnet being the equal of a long poem. People seem to be unable or unwilling to see that the 'long' poet (not in the sense of Borrow's Pridydd Hir) requires something additional to, and different from, poetry proper. In the first place, no human being can succeed at any rate no human being ever has yet succeeded-in keeping himself at the poetic flash-point, or above it, continuously for several thousand lines. Probably something would happen to him if he did, similar to that accident which so fortunately befell the Mrs Martha Gwynn of the epitaph:

'Who was so very pure within

She burst the outer shell of sin
And hatched herself a cherubin.'

But there is no necessity to consider this case because it has never occurred, and we may be quite sure never will

occur.

In default, then, of this power of keeping up the pure poetic transport at its highest, the long-poem writer has to resort to other devices. He must have something of that upon which his younger brother, the prose epic writer or novelist, has to rely almost wholly-the power of telling a story delightfully and creating character vividly. While perhaps in the latter respect he must have something in common with his almost twin, the dramatic poet, in that he cannot avail himself of detail and setting as the romancer or novelist can, and must throw his character out more prominently. Now Lang's novels, though well worth reading, are not decided masterpieces, and one does not know that he ever attempted the drama at all.*

On the other hand, this temperament of mixed melancholy and gaiety is almost of the very best for the poet who does not ambition things great and big. It dispenses him, once for all, from the tendency to look about painfully for a stool to be melancholy upon. That the

*

Things like the New Shakespeare' (III, 116, sq.) were of course mere 'skits,' and do not count.

House of Melancholy is rather better for the best poetry than the House of Mirth is a fairly well admitted fact; and ready-made stools, not of your own manufacture, are very bad furniture for either. Yet melancholy verse, and simply nothing but melancholy, is very apt to degenerate into those mere 'dismals' which are a weariness to spirit and flesh alike. Therefore the occasional poet-which does not mean some one who is only occasionally poetic, but one who can be poetic on many occasions—cannot be more happily provided than as just defined either in Lang's own words or in Miss Evans's.

But even he cannot safely rely on temperament alone even when strengthened by true poetic gift. Like his majestic brother he wants something more, and that something more is variety of interests, knowledge, and so forth.

*

grang

In this requirement, or department of requirements, scarcely any verse-writer of his contemporaries was better off than Lang, if any one was so well off. The word ' versatile' was no doubt used of him not entirely as a compliment by lukewarm admirers, and by those adversaries whom he brought upon himself by this very versatility. But there are many different ways of being versatile. The versatile sciolist is not exactly a person whom one has to go about with a lantern to find; and perhaps if, when he is found, he were promptly made away with, the scheme of things would not be much worsened. But in versatility of interest, so long as that interest is intelligent and real, there is hardly any fault to find: on the contrary, the seed of it can hardly be too widely sown, the examples of it too sedulously imitated. And when intelligent and well-informed interest is abundant in any person, that person having likewise the gift of poetry, let him by all means be encouraged to put the two in a curricle and drive them as far, as fast, and as often as he likes.

The collection opens with some of the best known of all Lang's verses, the beautiful Alma Matres on St Andrews and Oxford-wherein no one but a singularly feeble Oxonian would quarrel with the order of title or of affection, even if he did not know the undoubtedly

* Πόλλ ̓ ἐπίστατο ἔργα, κακῶς, ἐπίστατο πάντα.

strange and strong attraction of the northern city to I those who, without any filial relation, have had to do with it. The piece, too, is worthy of its place as an I overture because it is an emphatic signature beforehand. As has been hinted already, though the melancholy and the gaiety were admirably tempered in Lang's composition, the melancholy was really the substance and the gaiety the seasoning and corrective. Now if you compare, knowing them well, St Andrews and Oxford, the melancholy, reaching a certain grimness in the former, predominates immensely; while that in Oxford, though it exists as it must in all old places, is not only tempered by a gaiety which, except in students and golfers, hardly exists at all in the Northern Academe, but also is quite mastered by the greatness with which of course St Andrews cannot vie. And all this is intimated by touches in the poem

'O little city, worn and gray

And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street

Ghost-like and shadowy they stand
Deep mirrored in the wet sea-sand.'

Oxford has only one stanza here; but in the very next piece she comes to her own-on the gay side at leasthandsomely; and again in the next. Amateurs in sentimental psychology may question whether it is better to have your grave and gay recollections concentrated on one University or divided between two.

All three pieces, however, ought to show any reader of them who, being a competent one, is also a new-comer to the author, certain things of good promise.

Among the innumerable attempts at definition or at least description of the properties of poetry, not the least good, though of course it is nothing like exhaustive, is that it must have individuality; that it must be something which has a place of its own and is in that place irreplaceable. The place may or may not be high and large; the flower may be a single Japanese lily, in growth as tall as a man and in bloom as big as his head; a rose-tree covered with roses, or a mere

cushion of love-in-a-mist; or even as Lang modestly
called his own growths, mere 'grass of Parnassus'—
but it must be itself and nothing else. Now this
quality of idiosyncrasy was possessed by our present
author, if not flagrantly, unmistakably. Even as we
shall see later in stiff forms that might seem unfavour-
able to distinction, he has it; and on the other hand in
the loosest and lightest measures he has it too. Of
course this does not prevent him from echoing when he
chooses; on the contrary, deliberate echoes not merely
of Tennyson and Swinburne, whom he acknowledged as
his chief tutors in poetry, crowd the volumes. In fact, it
would be a very amusing task to the annotator, and
perhaps not a wholly dull one to that annotator's reader,
to identify and follow out Lang's originals in these
'echoing' passages.
They are sometimes traceable to
quite unexpected places-once, for example, unless the
present reviewer deceives himself, to a line in Whyte-
Melville's Katerfelto':

'For the maiden's dead and the Romany's fled and the Gorgio's galloped away.'

This gift, or quality, or fancy has made his verse translations* unacceptable to some because of their more than Drydenian paraphrase; and it has had a further effect, which, though not many people have, we think, noticed it, is really curious. On some accounts one might have thought that Lang's deliberate parodies would have been exceptionally good. But this is mainly true in the very lightest cases, such as the Swinburnian 'A Highly Valuable Chain of Thoughts' where the association of Swinburnian form and Wordsworthian title is characteristic:

'Had cigarettes no ashes,

And roses ne'er a thorn,
No man would be a funker

Of whin or burn or bunker.

There were no need for mashies,

The turf would ne'er be torn

Had cigarettes no ashes

And roses ne'er a thorn.'

* This applies only to verse. His prose translations are by all competent judgment allowed to be inferior to none in English for combination of accuracy and literary merit.

But in more serious and elaborate parodies such as those at the end of Vol. III, there is perhaps too much of the parodist himself, not for the general satisfaction of the reader but for the perfect realisation of the writer's immediate purpose.

Given this peculiar idiosyncrasy; given an excellent technique and an accurate ear; given the wide interest and variety already commented upon, and a faculty if vivid mimesis or reproduction in respect of almost any subject treated; given also reading far wider than that of most persons who are specifically called 'scholars,' and scholarship far more precise than that of the ordinary desultory reader :—what more do you require to produce something very much more than a minor poet? It used to be more or less directly answered, and one gathers that the answer has not become obsolete-'Increased intensity and seriousness; more absolute devotion to Art; more implicit obedience to the command

"Sculpte, lime, cisèle."'

Now these charges, or requirements involving charges, though more or less related to each other, are of unequal importance. It is perfectly true that verse was with Lang a medium of expression so natural, that there might have been a strong temptation not to take any trouble with it at all. Mrs Lang admits that she has discarded not a little, and there is probably not a little more which never came in her way to discard. The Castle of the Seven Deadly Sins,' much longed for but never seen by his intimates, is not here; nor, we think (an index of first lines would have been a boon), is a beautiful parody:

'The plumber and the publisher

Were walking hand in hand,'

which was all the more interesting, because the author himself was not merely 'hand in hand' but 'hand and glove' with more publishers than one. A copy of 'Ballads of Old France' which he gave to the present writer decades and double decades ago, has pasted in it, on a sheet of notepaper, a couple of MS. pieces, one of which appeared with some alteration afterwards, but the other (which, indeed, is of no great value) never.