present to be more remarkable for extent and size than for distinction. But we need not quarrel with that. The thing is genuine; the stuff is honest poetic material, not shoddy; and if some of the treatment tends at present to give us a kind of rhetorical realism in place of that musical and imaginative interpretation of life which is poetry, that is not unnatural in an age dominated by melodramatic journalism; and will pass away as those who practise it learn its emptiness by experience. Even if these defects were more marked than they are, they would afford no reason for failing to rejoice in the fact that poetry now makes monthly magazines go into second editions; that it has established a book-shop of its own, selling nothing but its own wares, a thing probably unknown before on this, hitherto, mainly prosaic earth; that it has issued a volume of Georgian poetry' which includes nothing published before the accession of George V ; finally that it has now established a quarterly review devoted solely to poetry and the discussion of poetry. All these things are of the best omen; they mean that the young poets believe in themselves and have found a public which believes in them too.

But in poetry, as in life itself, there are no absolutely new departures. The new which is to live is rooted in the old and knows that it is. So these young poets-and it is not the least interesting fact about them-have dedicated their volume, not to some revolutionary critic who flatters them by saying that they are the people and that wisdom was born with them, but to the most scholarly of English poets, to the intensely Etonian and Oxonian Robert Bridges. In him they rightly recognise the greatest living master of their art in this country, and at his feet they lay their work, an offering which does as much honour to them as to him. Mr Bridges has been as careful, not to say perverse, in avoiding fame as other men are in seeking for it: but even he must, we should suppose, take some pleasure in this striking tribute from his young fellow-craftsmen, poets so unlike him, and yet so like in that likeness which obliterates all unlikeness, in the sincere love and earnest practice of the greatest of the arts.

Only a few months after the appearance of this significant dedication, an event occurred which gives it a

special interest. The death of Mr Alfred Austin leaves the office of Poet Laureate vacant. That office, if it is to be continued at all on the present lines, demands from its holder certain special gifts which many great poets have not possessed. Mr Austin was not a great poet; he had neither the high imagination nor the large utterance of the great poets. But he had in abundance some of the qualifications which the Laureate needs. The poet who is to speak in verse for the whole nation, almost as the Sovereign or the Prince of Wales may occasionally speak for it in prose, must be a patriot, proud of his country, full of pride in her past and faith in her future. He must be something of a politician at least to the extent of believing, as poets have not always believed, in the greatness of political issues; and he must accept, and indeed honour, the traditions of his country. These gifts are the indispensable outfit of the Laureate; and they were as clearly possessed by Mr Austin as they were lacking to greater men, like Shelley, for instance, or Blake. And he added other gifts almost equally desirable for the part it fell to him to play. The strongest and perhaps the best thing in him was his genuine love of all that is specially English in meadow, wood and garden, English birds and trees and flowers. And the type of humanity in which he saw his ideal was also one that was obviously built on very English lines. All these things, which for some other purposes might be weaknesses, were sources of strength for the Laureateship, and though neither they nor the title of Laureate could raise a mediocre poet out of his mediocrity, they did give him the best possible field for the powers he had.

His death leaves the office vacant, with no obvious successor marked out by universal opinion. Some suggest that the opportunity should be taken to abolish a post which has become an anachronism. But that is not the English manner of dealing with anachronisms. We do not abolish; we transform. The King may no longer wish for a versifier to present him with complimentary odes on his birthday; but the poet is still the greatest of all national voices, and both King and nation may well desire to speak through him. If this be so, it will scarcely do to abandon the official and political position of the Laureate, and make the title a mere compliment to

the greatest living English poet. For fifty fortunate years the greatest of our poets was also the most national. But we cannot expect that the happy accident, which united in Wordsworth, and still more in Tennyson, all possible claims on the Laureateship, will always recur. We may be content with the unquestionable fact that there are several living poets who would do no dishonour to the laurel. But probably, as that dedication of ' Georgian' poetry tends to show, the appointment which would be received with most satisfaction among those who love and practise English letters is that of Mr Bridges. All see in him a master of their art, a lover of its past, a builder of its future, a true and genuine poet, who has not only uttered nothing base,' but nothing empty or insincere. All feel that, while he has never in any way courted popularity, he has all through his life been intensely and passionately English, cherishing and honouring all that is best in the traditions and character of the English people. And, what is not unimportant, all have found in his poems a loving observation of all that lives and grows in English fields such as none of our poets have surpassed. There is one other thing too. His Eton ode, to refer to only one instance, shows that he possesses not a little of the gift, seen at its highest in Horace, at not very far from its highest in Tennyson, of being able to take the set theme provided for him by an official occasion and make of it an opportunity for the production of a noble poem. That is the gift of gifts for a Laureate; and if the Laureateship should be offered to and accepted by Mr Bridges, one may be sure that his official utterances will give us poetry fitly expressing, but also far transcending, the mere event which they celebrate.

However this may be, those who are interested in these questions have now a better opportunity than they ever had before of forming their own opinion on the work of Mr Bridges. His poems have just been issued for the first time in one volume; and the library edition of his works will soon be completed. The single volume contains all that we get in the seven of the larger edition except the dramas and some work now published for the first time. Altogether independent, therefore, of the question of the Laureateship, the present is a convenient moment

for an examination of the poetical work and position of Mr Bridges.

He was born in 1844 and consequently will be seventy next year. We may hope that his old age will be as long and as fruitful as Landor's or Tennyson's; but in his case, as in theirs, it is not likely to alter his position as a poet. His work may be divided into three parts; the plays and masks, the metrical experiments, and the lyrics. Almost all that is of final importance belongs to the third class. Indeed, the plays and the poems of prosody are mainly important just so far as they give scope to the poet's lyrical genius, and not much further. Drama asks a certain demonic energy which is not in Mr Bridges. It can scarcely be written by a man whose whole life, after a few years spent in the study and practice of medicine, has been given to the labours and pleasures of a literary retirement. A dramatist is a man who has the capacity for being caught and carried away out of himself in the whirl of things, the particular things out of which the plot of his drama is to come; and part of the price that has to be paid for a life so wise and pleasant as that of Mr Bridges is just the loss of that capacity. The gifts of reflection, meditation, judgment, even sympathy are developed; the gift of absorption in the delight and fury of that battle of life which is the stuff of drama is almost inevitably lost. Indeed, to the spectator who looks at it through Cowper's 'loopholes of retreat,' both the delight and the fury are apt to seem a little ridiculous. The world for him seems a stage and all its men and women merely players; and it is one of life's truest paradoxes that, directly they seem that, they cannot be made into a play. Hamlet and Jaques would by themselves be fatal to drama. The dramatist, to be a dramatist, has got to get far enough away from such people to confront them with others who wholeheartedly believe in the sufficiency of the business and pleasure of living. That the meditative recluse can rarely do. Consequently the plays of Mr Bridges are the plays of a scholarly dilettante, accomplished and graceful, with all sorts of interesting things in them, especially to scholars, but not great dramas. The poet says that they were all intended for the stage, except the first part of Nero, but they are in fact scholarly exercises quite unsuitable for the boards.

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They are wanting not only in the action and business, but in the concentration of interest and definitely marked characters necessary for the stage.

By far the best of them is Achilles in Scyros'; and in this as in the two masks, Prometheus' and 'Demeter,' the strength lies, not in anything dramatic, but in the beautiful poetry to which Mr Bridges' loving and watchful observation of nature, and his meditations upon human life, often give occasion, especially in the Choruses. Worshipper of the spring, and of the joyous and relentless purpose of earth, as he has been throughout, he has never perhaps put either the beauty of it, or its pitilessness, better than in the first Chorus of Achilles.' Here is the beauty of the spring birds:

'And on the day of relenting she suddenly weareth
Her budding crowns. O then, in the early morn,

Is any song that compareth

With the gaiety of birds, that thrill the gladdened air
In inexhaustible chorus

To awake the sons of the soil

With music more than in brilliant halls sonorous

(-It cannot compare-)

Is fed to the ears of kings

From the reeds and hired strings.

For love maketh them glad;

And if a soul be sad,

Or a heart oracle dumb,

Here may it taste the promise of joy to come.'

The Chorus goes on to describe The omnipotent one desire' of earth and the end whereto it leapeth and striveth continually, and pitieth nought nor spareth'; the whole recalling the Greek tragedians, who so often in their choral songs took some one or other of these ancient and slumbering commonplaces of human experience, and touched it to new life and energy by adding to it a personal note of their own, and applying it to the business in hand.

Before going to the lyrics a few words may be added on the 'Poems in Classical Prosody' with which the collected volume concludes. It is impossible here to discuss Mr. Bridges' metrical views and practices which exhibit an attempt to write quantitative verse in English. The earlier ones follow closely the rules elaborated by