unknown in ours, are with one
exception his old familiar friends: men whose works connect themselves
with the intellectual sympathies and the imaginative pleasures of his
very earliest youth. The parleyings are:

I. "With Bernard de Mandeville."
II. "With Daniel Bartoli."
III. "With Christopher Smart."
IV. "With George Bubb Dodington."
V. "With Francis Furini."
VI. "With Gerard de Lairesse."
VII. "With Charles Avison."

They are enclosed between a Prologue and an Epilogue both dramatic and
fanciful, but scarcely less expressive of the author's mental
personality than the body of the work.

"Apollo and the Fates."
"Fust and his Friends."

In "Apollo and the Fates" the fanciful, or rather fantastic element
preponderates. It represents Apollo as descending into the realms of
darkness and pleading with the Fate Sisters for the life of Admetus, the
thread of which Atropos is about to clip; and shows how he obtained for
him a conditional reprieve by intoxicating the sisters with wine. The
sequel to this incident has been given in Mr. Browning's transcript from
"Alkestis"; and the present poem is introduced by references to that
work of Euripides, to the "Eumenides" of AEschylus and to Homer's "Hymn
to Mercury": the general sense of the passages indicated being this:--

Euripides.--"Admetus--whom, cheating the fates, I saved from death."

AEschylus (to Apollo).--"Aye, such were your feats in the house of
Pheres, where you persuaded the fates to make a mortal immortal: you it
was destroyed the ancient arrangement and deceived the goddesses with
wine."

Homer.--"The Fates are three virgin sisters,--winged and
white-haired,--dwelling below Parnassus: they feed on honey, and so get
drunk, and readily tell the truth. If deprived of it they delude."

Mr. Browning, however, varies the legend, first by making the Fates find
truth in the fumes of wine; and, secondly, by assuming that they never
knew an inspiring drunkenness until they tasted it: profoundly
intoxicating as their (fermented) honey must have been.

Apollo urges his request that Admetus, now threatened with premature
death, may live out the appointed seventy years. The Fates retort on
him by exclamations on the worthlessness of such a boon. They enumerate
the follies and miseries which beset the successive stages of man's
earthly career, and maintain that its only brightness lies in the
delusive sunsh