I. of the
English anthology. Part II. would consist of really bad verses from
really great poetry.

Auspicious Reverence, hush all meaner song,

is one of the most pompously stupid lines in English poetry. Arnold did
not hesitate to quote instances from Shakespeare:--

Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapp'd in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons.

You would have to sacrifice Browning, because it might fairly be
concluded--well, anything might be concluded about Browning. Byron is,
of course, a mine. Arthur Hugh Clough is, perhaps, the 'flawless
numskull,' as, I think, Swinburne calls him. Tennyson surpassed

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman,

in many of his serious poems.

To travellers indeed the sea
Must always interesting be

I have heard ascribed to Wordsworth, but wrongly, I believe. I should,
of course, exclude from the collection living writers; only the select
dead would be requisitioned. They cannot retort. And the entertaining
volume would illustrate that curious artistic law--the survival of the
unfittest, of which we are only dimly beginning to realise the
significance. It is like the immortality of the invalid, now recognised
by all men of science. You see it manifested in the plethora of memoirs.
All new books not novels are about great dead men by unimportant little
living ones. When I am asked, as I have been, to write recollections of
certain 'people of importance,' as Dante says, I feel the force of that
law very keenly.

_To_ FREDERICK STANLEY SMITH, ESQ.

SWINBLAKE: A PROPHETIC BOOK, WITH HOME ZARATHRUSTS.

Every student of Blake has read, or must read, Mr. Swinburne's
extraordinary essay, _William Blake: a critical study_, of which a new
edition was recently published. It would be idle at this time of day to
criticise. Much has been discovered, and more is likely to be
discovered, about Blake since 1866. The interest of the book, for us, is
chiefly reflex. _And does not the great mouth laugh at a gift_, if
scheduled in an examination paper with the irritating question, 'From
what author does this quotation come?' would probably elicit the reply,
'Swinburne.' Yet it occurs in one of Blake's prophetic books.

How fascinated Blake would have been with Mr. Swinburne if by some
exquisite accident he had lived _after_ him. We should have had, I
fancy, another Prophetic Book; something of this kind:

Swinburne roars and shakes the world's