tures' which
makes the vast lyric of _Tristram of Lyonesse_. To think of Byron's play
on the same subject, to compare the actual scenes which can be
paralleled in both plays, is to realise how much more can be done, in
poetry and even in drama, by a great lyric poet with a passion for what
is heroic in human nature and for what is ardent and unlimited in human
speech, than by a poet who saw in Faliero only the politician, and in
the opportunities of verse only the opportunity for thin and shrewish
rhetoric pulled and lopped into an intermittent resemblance to metre.

The form of _Locrine_ has something in common with the form of _Atalanta
in Calydon_, with a kind of sombre savagery in the subject which recurs
only once, and less lyrically, in _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_. It
is written throughout in rhyme, and the dialogue twists and twines,
without effort, through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene,
beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet,
Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line
stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by
Shakespeare in the _Rape of Lucrece_, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes,
and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a
third rhyme comes forward in the last line but one (after the manner of
terza rima) and starts a new octave, which closes at the end in a stanza
of two rhymes only, the last line but one turning back instead of
forward, to lock the chain's circle. No other English poet who ever
lived could have written dialogue under such conditions, and it is not
less true than strange that these fetters act as no more than a beating
of time to the feet that dance in them. The emotion is throughout at
white heat; there is lyrical splendour even in the arguments: and a
child's prattle, in nine-line stanzas of two rhymes apiece, goes as
merrily as this:

That song is hardly even as wise as I--
Nay, very foolishness it is. To die
In March before its life were well on wing,
Before its time and kindly season--why
Should spring be sad--before the swallows fly--
Enough to dream of such a wintry thing?
Such foolish words were more unmeet for spring
Than snow for summer when his heart is high:
And why should words be foolish when they sing?

Swinburne is a great master of blank verse; there is nothing that can be
done with blank verse that h