see him as he is. And so I think it will be with Rossetti. But to pass on to the poems.

"

By a general consensus of opinion," we are told, "The House of Life' has been pronounced Rossetti's greatest literary work." As the sonnets of Rossetti have alone, of all his verse, been imitated to any considerable extent, I suppose we must accept this statement. However, for my part I have not the slightest hesitation in differing from this opinion of the vox populi. Assuredly some few of the sonnets are among the very finest things that he wrote; but just now I wish to consider "The House of Life" as Rossetti himself wished it to be considered; that is, as a poem written in sonnets of which any single sonnet is no more a whole poem than is any single stanza of any other of his poems. Both in the editions of 1870 and 1881, and in his retort "The Stealthy School of Criticism," he insists on the unity of his poem as a " Sonnet-sequence." But the mere fact that no fewer than six sonnets printed separately in the edition of 1870, as having no connection with "The House of Life," were afterwards, without any material alteration, bodily worked into that series of sonnets, on its completion in 1881, would make us doubt the possibility of their being so. To which let me add this further sentence from the same series of letters from which I have already quoted. "To me who knew how miscellaneous they were and how occasional and accidental their composition was, they are no more a sequence than a basket of apples is a sequence of that fruit." This, coming from one who, not only from his knowledge of Rossetti, but also from his own critical power, has a right to speak, seems conclusive. However, 'tis but a shallow reading which discloses that "The House of Life" has no such continuous thread of thought by which these sonnets could be rightly said to be strung together into a sequence.

Again, their over-elaboration renders not a few almost incomprehensible, and when we have made our way through this bewilderment of expression, the thought beneath is often entirely unworthy of the pains. But I would have you distinguish this difficulty of expression from his Italian use of words which is quite another thing, and when used moderately has a peculiar charm and fascination.

But by far the most serious defect I have to bring against this. poem is one which applies more or less to all his later work, and one which, I fear, will prove more fatal to their final acceptance than anything else. When Emerson said that the reason why Americans would not enjoy Rossetti's poems was because they were 'exotic," he was speaking of the 1870 volume, the greater portion of which was written before 1862, and the marked difference between the poetry written before that date and the poetry written in 1869 and onward did not become fully apparent till the volume of 1881 was published. "Exotic" admirably and with precision expresses the warm Italian air, so different from the keen fresh atmosphere of our northern life, that fills the earlier work of Rossetti, both in poetry and painting. It is exotic, but all the same natural and healthy; it is still

"The breath of Heav'n fresh blowing, pure and sweet."

But in the poetry of 1869 and onward we feel that we are no longer under the open sky, although it was that of an Italian summer, but we are come into a room where the air is imprisoned, and the place choked with the fumes of some frightful narcotic. We rise up from reading these later poems with a distressing sense of weariness and oppression. I know that such Ballads as "The White Ship" and "The King's Tragedy" will be brought forward as a palpable refutation of this opinion; but even in these, I feel, as time goes on and we get farther and farther away from them, this want of true

healthiness will become more and more a barrier against their acceptance into the body of that literature which may be truly said to live. Moreover, in these poems, as in the pictures of this later period, his limitations of thought and sympathy become apparent; and we see the mannerisms of his verse correspond to the distressing colour of his flesh painting, the want of proper care in the drawing, and the entirely conventional form of the hands, lips, and necks in his pictures. A comparison of the "Pandora" of 1871, with the "Bocca Baciata" of 1859, shows from what a height of perfection, from its own point of view, the art of Rossetti had fallen.

And perhaps I must now give my reasons for having thus pointed out even the decadence of a man to whom we owe as much, possibly, as to any other poet of his time. Rossetti is entirely to be read, digested, and admired,—read, digested and admired with discernment; but never to be taken as a model, never to be followed as a master. His Italian nature precludes that we, who are of Northern blood, may do more than imitate him, and imitation invariably means an exaggeration of the worst faults of the original. His best work in its extreme elation and richness of thought and expression often strained the capacity of his art to the utmost; and his later work but too frequently topples over into obscurity. A more dangerous model we could not have, and yet there is a growing tendency among our younger writers not only to imitate him, but to imitate him in his least sound work, his Sonnets.

But if we can look on Rossetti with sober eyes and distinguish his best work from work which is morbid and over-wrought, what a living well of freshness shall we find there; indeed a water poured forth! He did not give us any new thought, or any new criticism of life, or, as Blake, any new attitude towards religion; but he brought a new temper more exalted and more sumptuous, than had been

known before, to the passions of men. In a word, he made a selection of the ideals of Dante, and idealized them. For this we cannot be too thankful, for poems like "Jenny," like "The Blessed Damozel," like a few of his early Songs, and for pictures like "Monna Vanna," and the "Beata Beatrix." But why stay to laud him thus? He is not likely to be wronged by insufficient praise, but rather by too much praise, praise that is indiscriminate.

THE “ALCESTIS” AT OXFORD.

HE vernal festival of Dionysus has been appropriately kept at Oxford, where, in the Thargelian month (if the latter half of a very modern English May can lay claim to this title), the Amateur Dramatic Society of the University produced the "Alcestis" of Euripides: not the least beautiful flower of " the flying blossom of the term.”

Such classical revivals are something more than pretty pastimes for undergraduates with a taste for acting. In them scholarship becomes pleasantly vitalized; and they are no less really a part of University training because not formally recognized as such. Several interesting performances of Greek plays have been given in the course of the last decade at Oxford and Cambridge; more frequently, so far, at Cambridge, where the "Ajax" of Sophocles was produced in 1882, the "Birds" of Aristophanes in 1883, and the "Eumenides" of Eschylus in 1886; as also the "Electra" of Sophocles by the ladies of Girton in 1883. Since the production of the " Agamemnon' of Æschylus about ten years ago, no Greek play has, so far as I know, been given at Oxford until this year. The "Edipus Tyrannus" is to be performed at Cambridge next winter; and it may be hoped that the success which has attended these classical revivals, and the general interest they have excited, may tend to make them annual or biennial in future.

An interesting novelty in the "Eumenides" at Cambridge was