ense accomplishment, a poet
with an incomparable gift of speech. That this technical quality, at
least, the sound of these new harmonies in English verse, awakened no
ears to attention, would be more surprising if one did not remember
that two years earlier the first and best of William Morris's books was
saluted as 'a Manchester mystery, not a real vision,' and that two years
later the best though not the first of George Meredith's books of verse,
_Modern Love_, was noticed only to be hooted at. Rossetti waited, and
was wise.

The plays of Swinburne, full as they are of splendid poetry, and even of
splendid dramatic poetry, suffer from a lack of that 'continual slight
novelty' which great drama, more than any other poetical form, requires.
There is, in the writing, a monotony of excellence, which becomes an
actual burden upon the reader. Here is a poet who touches nothing that
he does not transform, who can, as in _Mary Stuart_, fill scores of
pages with talk of lawyers, conspirators, and statesmen, versifying
history as closely as Shakespeare versified it, and leaving in the
result less prose deposit than Shakespeare left. It is perhaps because
in this play he has done a more difficult thing than in any other that
the writer has come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in
general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar
satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties,
leads him to say of the modern play, _The Sisters_, that it is the only
modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural
dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse
between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or
made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This
may be as true as that, in the astounding experiment of _Locrine_, none
of 'the life of human character or the life-likeness of dramatic
dialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed
to the exigences of metre.' But when all is said, when an unparalleled
skill in language, versification, and everything that is verbal in form,
has been admitted, and with unqualified admiration; when, in addition,
one has admitted, with not less admiration, noble qualities of
substance, superb qualities of poetic imagination, there still remains
the question: is either substance or form consistently dramatic? and the
further question: can work professedly d