But his frenzies have a very calculated air; he has not got rid of those clichés, and that wit does not emerge. He cannot really play the revolutionary with gusto, so, as Queen Victoria said, "We are not amused": and when he lapses into more ordinary forms and more connected statements he is revealed as an ordinary immature writer of verses. He has some gift of observation which he will waste unless he treats it more conscientiously, but observation will not make a poet.
CARMINA RAPTA. By Griffyth Fairfax. Elkin Mathews. 3s. 6d. and 2s. 6d. net.
Mr. Fairfax's volume consists of "Verse translations from the French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, with a few Arabic, Japanese, and Armenian renderings from French prose versions." Mezzofanti and the monk Calepino, in another sphere, must be alarmed for their linguistic laurels. Some of Mr. Fairfax's translations are neat; but we hope those from the Armenian—our Armenian wants rubbing up—are nearer the spirit of the originals than are some of those from European languages. He is at his neatest in some brief poems from the Spanish. His versions of Hérédia and Baudelaire are especially lifeless; and he inflicts an additional injury upon the latter by attributing the famous Don Juan in Hell to Hérédia.
THE CLOWN OF PARADISE. By Dormer Creston. Heath Cranton. 3s. net.
We notice this volume merely in order to record a neologism which we commend to the notice of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary. It is found in this passage:
My tearful soul did slip into those silver pools,
And, bathing in that stillness,
Was oned with God.
In the Court of Sir Henry Duke, we may continue, people are twoed.