ft a rivulet so
narrow that it may be stept over, without honourable mention; and has
animated hills and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams
of old mythology." No more delightful task could be the lifework of a
poet who loved his own land; but it could hardly be done again, nor, I
dare say, ever be done again so well.

To describe, however, the windings and circumfluences of rivers, the
embraces of mountain and rain-cloud in language on the other side
of amorousness may easily be inconvenient or ridiculous, and not
impossibly both; but I shouldn't at all mind upholding in public
disputation, say, at the Poetry Bookshop, that there was no other way
than Drayton's of doing the thing at all. It was the mythopoetic way.
For purposes of poetry, Britain is an unwieldy subject, and if you are
to allow to a river no other characters than those of mud and ooze,
swiftness or slowness, why, you will relate of it little but its rise,
length and fall. Drayton's weakness is that he can conceive of no
other relation than a sex-relation, and in so describing the relations
of every river in England, he very naturally becomes tedious. Satiety
is the bane of the amorist, and of worse than he. Casanova had that
in front of him when he set out to be immoral, _on ne peut plus_, in
seven volumes octavo. There simply were not enough vices to go round.
He ended, therefore, by being a dull as well as a dirty dog. "Take
back your bonny Mrs. Behn," said Walter Scott's great-aunt to him
after a short inspection, "and if you will take my advice, put her
in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first
novel." The nemesis of the pornographer: he can't avoid boring you to
tears.

THE WELTER

Soused still to the ears in the lees of war, I win a rueful reminder
from a stray volume of _Hours in a Library_. Was the world regenerated
between 1848 and 1855? Were English labourers all properly fed, housed
and taught? Had the sanctity of domestic life acquired a new charm in
the interval, and was the old quarrel between rich and poor definitely
settled? Charles Kingsley (of whom the moralist was writing) seems
really to have believed it, and attributed the exulting affirmative
to--the Crimean War! The Crimean War, after our five years of colossal
nightmare, looks to us like a bicker of gnats in a beam; yet perhaps
any war will do for a text, since any war will produce some moral
upheaval in the generations concerned