'As your lordship pleases,' said both counsel, bowing and smiling. With costs?"

'Costs out of the estate,' snapped out the judge. Read the order.'

He fell back in his chair and closed his eyes whilst the little associate read the order in a thin, dry, rapid voice. It was a lengthy document to the effect that Robert Forshaw, K.C., barristerat-law, of No. 10 King's Bench Walk, Temple, in consideration of a grant of youth, a new appetite, and a two hundred and fifty yards' drive, these being his heart's desires, took over his nephew's personality with all his faults of temper, incapacity for earning money and existing love affairs whatsoever.

'Stop there!' cried Forshaw, K.C., startled at the word 'love.' 'This wants further consideration.'

'You can't have further consideration in a Court of Changery,' said the judge, waking up and smiling at Forshaw's ignorance. 'You should consider things before you go to law, or afterwards when you get the bill of costs. If we began to consider things here we should never get our work done. You should come here ready to do business. If you want to change places, change places. If you don't, let me get to my lunch.'

'But do you mean to say,' said Robert Forshaw, if I want to drive a long ball and have an appetite like Herbert's that I've got to take on all his personality?'

'And do you really mean,' cried Herbert aghast, that if I am to have money and power I have to take on my uncle's-well, drawbacks?'

'You've hit it, young man,' said the judge. A Court of Changery is a Court of Equity. You want money and power, and your uncle wants health and youth, much of which he might have retained if he had not been so greedy of money and good living. You each go about envying each other and crying aloud, "Why am I not rich like my uncle? Why am I not young like my nephew?" These are your hearts' desires. Now, equity says you can obtain relief, but you must take the burdens as well as the benefits of what you desire. Don't waste the time of the court any more. I shall confirm the order.'

Robert looked at Herbert and Herbert at Robert. The judge looked at his watch.

What do you say, my boy?' asked Robert.

'I don't think it is good enough, uncle.'

ރ

'No one ever did,' chuckled the judge. And he gathered up his robes and bolted through a little door at the back of the Bench, and a faint but pleasant odour of grilled mutton chop stole across the emptying court.

And coming to the hotel, they found the Professor had arrived to join them for a few days' holiday. And after dinner, when they told him their story, he being a Welshman marvelled not at all, but only rallied them on their faint-heartedness.

'Nevertheless,' he said, 'I am glad for some things that you have remained as you are, for to-morrow I am expecting as my guest a young lady, the daughter of my oldest and dearest friend.'

Herbert blushed.

'You are quite right, Herbert. It is Connie.'

Robert Forshaw remembered with a smile the wording of the order in the Court of Changery.

' And when I have introduced you to the young lady,' said the Professor, then, Forshaw, I want you to be the good fairy to these young people, for you can do much to grant them their hearts' desires, which I believe are hopelessly involved in Changery.' 'And so Herbert is to have his heart's desires after all,' said Robert Forshaw, with a mock sigh. And what is to become of me?'

You and I,' said the Professor, placing his hand gently on his friend's shoulder, 'you and I are going to stay here and play golf until you can return to London with an appetite-a real Welsh appetite.'

EDWARD A. PARRY.

DID BROWNING WHISTLE OR SING?

IN the city where I chance to live, among women of leisure it is a popular form of philanthropy-or of amusement, if you are uncharitable enough to call it so-to teach English to the Japanese youth who seek our western shore in such numbers. On one occasion a friend of mine who was thus engaged asked a group of boys to write a composition on poetry. Among the efforts was the following Poetry you are my very dear friend. I am understand the natural of you, and generate my idle spirit to your ability.' That poetry is my very dear friend I am certain, but when I see how my estimates of it differ from those of others, I feel sure either that I do not understand its 'natural' or that they do not. I prefer to think the latter.

I had this forcibly brought home the other day when my friend the psychologist, with whom I have many congenial interests, fell to criticising the crudity of Browning's verse, contending that ideas, great in themselves, were left to shift as best they might, and to hobble along on any chance crutch that their impatient and improvident author might whittle out for them.

I fancy that this idea is the prevailing one, and yet the more that I study Browning's verse, the more convinced I am that he was one of our great masters of technique, a metrician of consummate skill.

The other day I asked a little fellow who is being reared on Stevenson's Child Verses' to tell me what a poem is. He replied: 'Oh, it's something that isn't true, but you all wish it was true, and that is put in nice jolly words.' This is a very good popular definition, and I commend it to the lexicographers as an improvement. But for a scientific definition I would choose the one formulated by Professor Bradley in his inaugural lecture. An actual poem,' he says, 'is the succession of experiences-sounds, images, thoughts, emotions-through which we pass when we are reading as poetically as we can. Of course,' he adds, 'this imaginative experience-if I may use the phrase for brevity-differs with every reader and every time of reading; a poem exists in innumer

able degrees. But that insurmountable fact lies in the nature of things and does not concern us now.' In other words, the actual poem is the poem operative, just as the actual flower is the sum of emotions, sensations, and thoughts that are stimulated by it. Whatever truth they may claim when objectively interpreted, subjectively the beautiful verses of Alfred Noyes upon the rose are profoundly true, for the rose is realised only in that fineness of sensation that our spiritual heritage makes possible to us :

What does it take to make a rose,

Mother mine?

The God that died to make it knows
It takes the world's eternal wars,
It takes the moon and all the stars,

It takes the might of heaven and hell
And the everlasting love as well,
Little child.

Now it may be declared a corollary to Professor Bradley's definition, may it not, that a poem is great in proportion to the liveliness of the experience that it occasions in the cultivated mind, in proportion to its compelling power over the imagination. If the poem absolutely engages one for the time being, lifts him out of himself, carries him to its own enchanted realms, and never once allows him to recall that he is not in the land of reality but of dreams, then it is a great poem.

I think it is conclusive that such an experience can only be derived from a poem in which there is complete correspondence between the thought and the form, for the slightest failure in such correspondence is at once felt, and destroys the illusion. Wherever such disparity exists, it is either the result of insincerity, in which case the poet has been self-consciously indulging in fine writing and wishes to give his composition a splendour that the thought does not warrant, or else it results from the attempt to express a thought that has not yet taken clear form in the author's own mind. Wherever a poet has firm grasp upon an idea, and earnestly desires to communicate it, the thought and the form are fused-are, in fact, merely aspects of the same thing. As Faust replies to the nagging pedant:

Clear wit and sense

Suggest their own delivery;

And if thou'rt moved to speak in earnest,

What need that after words thou yearnest ?

Yes, your discourses, with their glittering show,
Where ye for men twist shredded thought like paper,
Are unrefreshing as the winds that blow

The rustling leaves through chill autumnal vapour.1

This true relation of thought and form is explained by the nature of the medium through which poetry expresses itself. In the course of one of the earlier chapters of ' Modern Painters' (I., 2, 1, 7, 20) the author has this to say of the relation of style to subjectmatter: What is usually called the style or manner of an artist is, in all good art, nothing but the best means of getting at the particular truth which the artist wanted; it is not a mode peculiar to himself of getting at the same truths as other men, but the only mode of getting the particular facts he desires, and which mode, if others had desired to express those facts, they also must have adopted. All habits of execution persisted in under no such necessity, but because the artist has invented them, or desires to show his dexterity in them, are utterly base; for every good painter finds so much difficulty in reaching the end he sees and desires that he has no time nor power left for playing tricks on the road to it; he catches at the easiest and best means he can get; it is possible that such means may be singular, and then it will be said that his style is strange; but it is not a style at all, it is the saying of a particular thing in the only way in which it possibly can be said.' If this is true in painting, it must be doubly true in such an art as poetry, which is forced to express itself through symbols. Words are the symbols of ideas, and every word is surrounded by a certain distinctive atmosphere, which is to be distinguished from the atmosphere that radiates from its closest synonym. To define this atmosphere may defy the powers of the most versatile and subtle lexicographer, but it is felt by every sensitive mind, even when so delicate as to elude definition. A word is the key to an exclusive treasure-house, which it alone can unlock. It is a servant that has been trained to one particular duty, quite outside the province or the powers of another. It is a citizen of the world that has ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes, and that bears the evidence of all this contact. It is, in short, a highly-developed, unmistakable personality.

Just as words have this unique character, this inviolable individuality, so also do the combinations of words into sentences or phrases, so that even a simple expression such as 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills' can never be adequately paraphrased.

1 Faust, scene i., tr. of Bayard Taylor.