Thus much we have quoted in support of a criticism which will not be readily assented to by all. Our space does not admit of our quoting more. But we refer the reader to The Blessed Damozel as a gem not to be outshone; and, for dramatic power joined to the loftiest poetry, to A Last Confession.

Next after Rossetti, if at all after, comes William Morris. In the form and sound and bias of their numbers there is a close resemblance. The imaginings of the latter flow more profusely, perhaps because he does not tarry to spend so much care upon his art. Indeed, whilst the art of Rossetti is faultless in its way, a seldom blemish, like a minute blur in a diamond of the best water, may be detected in that of Morris, as the word “now” thrice in three successive quatrains, the word “golden” in five successive lines, in a scene, of almost tragic pathos, of Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery—the finest music he has smitten from the chords of no feeble instrument:

“Why not, O twisting knight, now he is dead?”

But amidst so much finish and faultlessness slight fallibilities like these are, as it were, a relief. The truth is, the artistic spirit in both, which (and no wonder) is all enamored of

mediæval art—art in those ages of faith when she appeared in forms of beauty as sublime as faultless—is too forgetful of the living, breathing, moving present. That they should drink in inspirations of the Beautiful and the True from the forms in which that most poetic age embodied them, is well; but the art—the poetic expression—was natural to that epoch; it is not natural to this. If this is made too conspicuous, as we think it is in both these poets, there is a risk of mannerism; and mannerism is an artistic blemish. The attempt to entice men away from the turbid and muddy torrent of sounding hap-hazard words, which, setting in from Johnson and Gibbon, has swollen into an inundation of all but sheer nonsense from the babbling tributaries of the cheap press, to the nervous grace of simple words and simple sentences and the suggestive imagery of pure nature, is a service to letters as well as art, for which alone they and Tennyson, and all the poets of that school, deserve to be crowned. But aught by which so profoundly artistic a renaissance is needlessly dissociated from the present should have been carefully eschewed. In the matter of words we do not think that such as “japes,” “dromond,” “whatso,” the substitution of the ending “head” for “hood” in words for which universal custom has decreed the former, and so on, are a needed revival of the obsolete. We think, too, that simplicity of grammatical construction has been pushed to the verge of affectation. Still, it is so artistically done, is so beautiful in itself, and evidences such a return of leal homage from hideousness to the rightful Beautiful and the True, that it goes against us to complain.

It is time that the appointment

of a poet-laureate should cease in England. It is an anachronism. It is almost an insult to the world of letters. These are not times in which people are likely to accept the criticism of the British crown or of the crown’s advisers as decisive of a poet’s merits. So, too, there is such a dearth of independent, trustworthy criticism, it has become such a follow-the-leader kind of business, that if the crown merely caps the opinion of the contemporary public, there is every chance of the wrong man being put in the wrong place. At any rate the appointment should not be limited to one. There should be “power to add to their number.” We have no hesitation in assigning a higher niche to either Rossetti or Morris than to Tennyson. In two respects Morris surpasses Rossetti. We have as yet from the latter no sustained efforts such as The Earthly Paradise of the former, and the poetic fire appears to be kindled in him with less effort. We are quite sure that it is in no spirit of challenge or rivalry that he takes Tennyson’s very own theme in The Defence of Guenevere, King Arthur’s Tomb, Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery, and The Chapel in Lyoness; but it is an involuntary expression of conscious power. In all the Idyls of the King there is not a passage of such vivid poetry as the following in The Defence of Guenevere:

“‘All I have said is truth, by Christ’s dear tears.’

She would not speak another word, but stood

Turned sideways, listening like a man who hears