Docet" and "Selenites" of _Marah_, more than thirty
years later. The other was a much more individual power, and by some
might be ranked higher. It is the gift of what can best generally be
called ironical narration, using irony in its proper sense of covert
suggestive speech. This took various forms, indicated with more or less
clearness in the very titles of _Chronicles and Characters_ and _Fables
in Song_,--symbolic-mystical in _Legends of Exile_ (where not only some
of the legends but the poems called "Uriel" and "Strangers" are among
the best things of the author and highly typical of his later manner),
and fantastically romantic, with a strong touch of symbolism, in _King
Poppy_. And when, as happens in most of the pieces mentioned above and
many others, the combination welds itself into a kind of passionate
allegory, few poets show a better power of transporting the reader in
the due poetic manner. There can be no doubt that if Lord Lytton had
developed this faculty somewhat earlier (there are traces of it very
early), had made its exercises rather more clear and direct, and had
subjected their expression to severer thinning and compression, he would
have made a great reputation as a poet. As it is, it cannot be denied
that he had the positive faculties of poetry in kind and degree only
inferior to those possessed by at most four or five of his English
contemporaries from Tennyson downwards.

Nor should there perhaps lack mention of Roden Noel and Thomas Ashe, two
writers in whom, from their earlier work, it was not unreasonable to
expect poets of a distinct kind, and who, though they never improved on
this early work, can never be said exactly to have declined from it. The
first and elder was a son of the Earl of Gainsborough, was born in 1834,
went to Cambridge, travelled a good deal, and at various times, till his
death at the age of sixty, published much verse and not a little prose,
both showing a distinctly poetical imagination without a sufficient
organ of expression. Nor did he ever develop this except in _A Little
Child's Monument_, where the passionate personal agony injures as much
as it helps the poetical result. Mr. Ashe, who was born in 1836, and
died in 1889, also a Cambridge man, had a much less ambitious and rather
less interesting but somewhat better-organised talent for verse, and his
_Sorrows of Hypsipyle_, published in 1866, caused and authorised at the
time considerable expectations from him.