this phrase anything like wholesale disrespect for Byron. He is undoubtedly one of the most striking figures in the marvellous romance of English literature: a great man of letters always, a great poet sometimes, but a great artist only by chance, if, indeed, that be not a contradiction in terms. We return to Byron occasionally, with amusement, refreshment, admiration; Wordsworth we have always with us.

Coleridge, of course, came to me in the train of Wordsworth, and The Ancient Mariner seemed to me at seventeen, what it seems to me now, the most magical of poems, an inspiration and a miracle. But my feeling for the more intimate refinements of the art was still very backward. Tennyson I read with pleasure, but cared principally for Locksley Hall, The Dream of Fair Women, Come into the Garden, Maud, and such sugar-plums, exquisite though they be. Keats had as yet taken no hold on me. Milton I could not read.

The Scotch school and college course in my day was carefully devised so as to prevent even a moderately intelligent boy from coming into anything like vital relation with classical literature. In Greek I read portions of the Iliad, six books of the Odyssey, and a tragedy or two-all purely as a task. In Latin I acquired some real relish for Horace, but such imperfect appreciation as I have of Catullus and Virgil has come to me since my college days. Of Lucretius I know only one or two hackneyed scraps; of Juvenal some longer fragments. Here endeth the tale of my communion with the poets of antiquity.

Shakespeare the dramatist I came to know, in a general way, pretty early, both on the stage and off; but my appreciation of Shakespeare the poet came only with maturity, and has grown with each succeeding year. To know Chaucer was to love him at once and for ever, sweetest of singers and of spirits. Matthew Arnold has somewhere demonstrated that Chaucer is not a poet of the very first order, not quite

the peer of Dante or of Shakespeare. Of course he is right; but why talk about it? Why make criticism an affair of the foot-rule? Whatever other poets there have been or may yet be, so long as English is English lovers of poetry will always say Amen to that line of old Dunbar's:

The noble Chaucer, of makars flower.

But the test of a mature sense of poetical values is, to my thinking, a genuine appreciation of Milton. With me it came late. I spent my twentieth year idling in Australia, and being somewhat hard up for literature, I set myself to read Paradise Lost from beginning to end, at the rate of a book a day. I accomplished the task, but it bored me unspeakably, and I used to take an unholy revenge in chuckling between-whiles over Taine's analysis of the poem. I did not return to it for seven or eight years, until one day I found myself starting on a railway journey with nothing to read, and paid a shilling at the station bookstall for a pocket Paradise Lost. That was to me an ever memorable journey; the poem became my bedside book for months; and ever since, when I have ten minutes to spare for pure pleasure, I open Paradise Lost almost at random. Its story may very probably merit Taine's strictures. I neither know nor care. For me it has no story. It is simply an inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry.

Except in the case of a few college exercises, my own metrical efforts have been almost entirely confined to comic, or at any rate journalistic, verse. They have given me more or less insight into the methods, the mental processes, of verse-making; but I never attained even the fluency of the practised newspaper rhymester. Greek and Latin verses were undreamt of in the Scottish curriculum of my day. Practically, we knew not what quantity meant.

Having traced, in something like their order, the poetical influences of my boyhood, I will now give a sketch-map of

the main grooves into which my mature predilections have settled. As I survey the wide expanse of English nondramatic verse, three figures seem to me to stand preeminent, the summits or landmarks of the scene. They are Chaucer, Milton, Keats. Other poets have surpassed them in this way and in that: in their divination and realisation of the highest potentialities of beauty in language, they are unsurpassed and unsurpassable. If they were the only poets in our tongue, English would still rank second to none among the idioms of poetry. In Elizabethan and Jacobean non-dramatic verse I am by no means well read; but I take unbounded delight in the lyric poets of the seventeenth century, from Herrick and Crashaw and Campion downwards. What an age was that in which (say) Sir Henry Wotton could hold an almost unregarded place-the man who wrote:

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You meaner beauties of the night,

That poorly satisfy our eyes

More by your number than your light,

You common people of the skies;

What are you, when the moon shall rise?

You curious chanters of the wood,

That warble forth Dame Nature's lays,

Thinking your passion understood

By your weak accents; what's your praise
When Philomel her voice shall raise?

You violets that first appear,

By your pure purple mantles known
Like the proud virgins of the year,

As if the spring were all your own;
What are you, when the rose is blown?

The author of this glorious lyric was himself one of the meaner beauties of the night." In Mr. Saintsbury's Elizabethan Literature he is dismissed in one line; in Mr. Gosse's Jacobean Poets he is not mentioned (at any rate not indexed) at all. I do not impugn these gentlemen's

sense of proportion; on the contrary, I believe it to be in this instance quite just. But what a testimony to the wealth of the age !

For the eighteenth century and its great precursor, Dryden, I have a true esteem, a warm affection. Where I find high literary power in verse, I am quite willing to enjoy it without inquiring too curiously into its imaginative quality, or troubling overmuch as to whether or no it deserves the name of poetry. If our definition of poetry has no room for the following lines (from Don Sebastian), then I think it needs enlargement :

Death may be call'd in vain, and cannot come;
Tyrants can tie him up from your relief,

Nor has a Christian privilege to die.

Alas! thou art too young in thy new faith;
Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls,
And give 'em furloughs for another world;
But we, like sentries, are oblig'd to stand

In starless nights, and wait the appointed hour.

The many prosaic associations of the ten-syllable couplet ought not to blind us to the splendid flashes of true poetry in Pope, in Goldsmith, aye, even in Johnson; nor can I understand how any one can suppose the torch of imagination to have been extinguished in the age of Collins and Gray. The feeling that literary power is in itself admirable and delightful, even if it have not the supreme charm of poetry, enables me to read Cowper and Crabbe with great pleasure. Perhaps it is the same feeling that leads me to differ from those critics who, taking Carlyle's cue, apologise for Burns as a poor, stunted, incomplete creature-a view which even Mr. J. M. Robertson in the main accepts. It seems to me that in his songs (to which Mr. Robertson applies a quite inapplicable standard of formal perfection) Burns often touched the very summit of lyric charm, while in his other verse, except, of course, in a few manifest failures, he showed himself a superb literary craftsman, whom no amount

of "culture" or "leisure" could possibly have improved. I say then, with Mr. Henley, that in Burns "the poorliving, lewd, grimy, free-spoken, ribald, old Scots peasantworld came to a full, brilliant, even majestic close."

Scott,

My attitude towards the Lake Poets and their satirist has already been sufficiently indicated. Blake I read with pleasure, but he does not take strong hold on me. one of the greatest of great men, seems to me very nearly a great poet when he draws his inspiration direct from those border ballads, which, by the way, contain some of the purest poetic treasures of the language.

Now comes the point at which the critic has doubtless been lying in wait for me. "Then they said unto him 'Say now Shibboleth'; and he said 'Sibboleth.' . . . Then they took him and slew him at the passages of Jordan." In English criticism Shibboleth is spelt "Shelley," and he who pronounces the word without a genuflexion is slain "right there"-in the esteem of an influential school of critics. Well, I genuflect, with a difference. I think Shelley was one of the rarest poetic spirits the world ever saw—a prince of song, who, but for a capful of wind in the Gulf of Genoa, might have become an almost peerless king. His figure is one of the most sympathetic, his story quite the most tragic and haunting, in the aforesaid romance of English literature. But though he lived four years longer than Keats, and wrote so much more, I cannot but regard him as the more unfulfilled, the more problematic, genius of the two. Shelley resembles a glorious statue roughly blocked-out, Keats a finished masterpiece, sadly truncated indeed, but with the vine-wreathed head complete and godlike. Shelley's genius never really clarified, or only for brief intervals. To the last-even in Adonaïs his thought was more obviously conditioned by his rhyme than it ought to be in verse of classical perfection. His three or four great lyrics, and some of his small ones, apart, his work produces on me very