I tremble with the splendid weight.
To my unworth ’tis given to know
How dread the charge I undergo
Who claim the holy Muse as mate.
It is to be hoped that Mr. Sterling’s reverent attitude toward his art has suffered no abatement from his having been thrown to the swine for allegiance to an alien faith hateful to his countrymen.
[2] Mr. Arthur Brisbane.
MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS
I HAVE not the happiness to know if Mr. George Bernard Shaw has ever written as good a play as “As You Like It.” He says he has, and certainly he ought to be able to remember what plays he has written. I don’t know that blank verse is, as Mr. Shaw declares, “a thing that you could teach a cat if it had an ear.” My notion is that blank verse—good blank verse—is the most difficult of all metrical forms, and that among English poets Milton alone has mastered it. I don’t know that Mr. Shaw is right in his sweeping condemnation of the blank verse of that indubitable “master of tremendous prose,” Shakspeare. As a critic, Mr. Shaw ought to know that Shakspeare wrote very little blank verse, technically and properly so called, his plays being, naturally, mostly in what the prosodian knows, and what as a playwright Mr. Shaw might be expected to know, as dramatic blank, a very different thing.
But this I know, and know full well—