Mr. Poynter's _Diadumene_ by the
British Matron of _The Times_ newspaper. Now, we have got to be so
curious in ideals that we cannot away with the thought of imperfection.
Our worship must have for its object something flawless, something
utterly without spot or blemish. We can be satisfied with nothing less
than an entire and perfect chrysolite; and we cannot taste our
Shakespeare at his worst without experiencing not merely the burning
sense of shame aforesaid but also a frenzy of longing to father his
faults upon somebody else--Marlowe for instance, or Green, or
Fletcher--and a fury of proving that our divinity was absolutely
incapable of them. That Shakespeare varied--that the matchless prose and
the not particularly lordly verse of _As You Like It_ are by the same
hand; that the master to whom we owe our Hamlet is also responsible for
Gertrude and King Claudius; that he who gave us the agony of Lear and the
ruin of Othello did likewise perpetrate the scene of Hector's murder, in
manner so poor and in spirit so cynical and vile--is beyond all belief
and patience; and we have argued the point to such an extent that we are
all of us in Gotham, and a mooncalf like the ascription of whatever is
good in Shakespeare to Lord Bacon is no prodigy but a natural birth.

SIDNEY

His Expression of Life.

Sidney's prime faults are affectation and conceit. His verses drip with
fine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta-physics that much
of its flavour and sweetness has escaped. Very often, too, the conceit
embodied is preposterously poor. You have as it were a casket of finest
gold elaborately wrought and embellished, and the gem within is a mere
spangle of paste, a trumpery spikelet of crystal. No doubt there is a
man's heart beating underneath; but so thick is the envelope of buckram
and broidery and velvet through which it has to make itself audible that
its pulsations are sometimes hard to count, while to follow it throb by
throb is impossible. And if this be true of that _Astrophel and Stella_
series in which the poet outpours the melodious heyday of his youth--in
which he strives to embody a passion as rich and full as ever stirred
man's blood--what shall be said of the _Arcadia_? In that 'cold
pastoral' he is trying to give breath and substance to as thin and frigid
a fashion as has ever afflicted literature; and though he put a great
deal of himself into the result, still every one has not t