scription, or character. They supply an obvious way of escape for
the Romantic tendency which does not wish to break wholly with
classical tradition; and above all, they admit of indulgence in that
immense _variety_ which seems to have become one of the chief
devices of modern art, attempting the compliances necessary to gratify
modern taste.

The Herodotean anecdote of the Egyptian King Mycerinus, his
indignation at the sentence of death in six years as a recompense for
his just rule, and his device of lengthening his days by revelling all
night, is neither an unpromising nor a wholly promising subject. The
foolish good sense of Mr Toots would probably observe--and
justly--that before six years, or six months, or even six days were
over, King Mycerinus must have got very sleepy; and the philosophic
mind would certainly recall the parallel of Cleobis and Biton as to
the best gift for man. Mr Arnold, however, draws no direct moral. The
stanza-part of the poem, the king's expostulation, contains very fine
poetry, and "the note" rings again throughout it, especially in the
couplet--

"And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all,
_And the night waxes, and the shadows fall_."

The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with
the still finer companion-_coda_ of _Sohrab and Rustum_, the
author's masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and
consummate example of Mr Arnold's favourite device of finishing
without a finish, of "playing out the audience," so to speak, with
something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to
relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often
melancholy themes.

One may less admire, despite its famous and often-quoted line,

"Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,"

the sonnet _To a Friend_, praising Homer and Epictetus and
Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness. Nor
am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer _Sick
King in Bokhara_ which (with a fragment of an _Antigone_,
whereof more hereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, _The
Strayed Reveller_ itself. There is "the note," again, and I daresay
the orientalism has the exactness of colour on which, as we know from
the _Letters_, Mr Arnold prided himself. Yet the handling of the
piece seems to me prolix and uncertain, and the drift either very
obscure or somewhat unimportant. But about the _Shakespeare_
sonnet which