matched in the mouth like bells," through wood and over field of the poetic country.'*

The last image is very happy; for Theseus' hunt and Atalanta's are in like material.' The criticism too as criticism is acute and just though it will be noted that even here, with all his enthusiasm behind him, Professor Saintsbury's style contrives rather to belittle his theme than raise it. To one fresh from reading the chorus which our author cites, or some of the other great passages from Atalanta,' 'O that I now, I too, were,' or 'But thou, O mother-The dreamer of dreams,' the talk about dancing and gyration would come like a cold douche. Professor Saintsbury's enthusiasm is great both for Tennyson and Swinburne, the poets, one may guess, of his early poetry-reading years: it is too great weighed in the strict scales of justice. It is an ungracious task to disparage in any degree the last among the famous poets of our land, the last to be numbered in the illustrious company of whom

'l'onorata nominanza

Che di lor suon su nella nostra vita'

demands 'gracia' of heaven itself. But it is also unfair and dangerous to blink the fact that the metre of Swinburne expresses very clearly a prosodic decay in England, which corresponds to or foretells the very visible latter-day decay among us in all literary judgement and taste. The note which Swinburne first struck in the chorus which Professor Saintsbury cites-and which was so new and interesting then-grew to be the dominant one in all his verse, and is his chief poetic and prosodic legacy. Swinburne tried an infinity of metres. He was extremely imitative, and, with his great gift of words and a certain facility which goes with the imitative tendency, he achieved a measure of success, avoided at the worst all appearance of failure in every one of these metres. No sooner had the cult of old French forms arisen, than Swinburne was able to publish his Century of Roundels'; and when Omar Khayyam' had taken the town, he wrote the Omar quatrain with facility and grace. He was indeed eminently, in the language of old French verse, a docte poète. His blank verse, as Professor Saintsbury says, 'has always been of fine quality and more penetrated with direct 'study of the Elizabethans than perhaps that of anyone.' But, alas! how lifeless! It is, as Portia says, a sin to be a mocker. Yet is there not a premonition of Mr. Kipling and

* Vol. iii. p. 335.

his pocket divinity in such lines as these, which are meant to express the height of passion?

'Doth God think

How shall I be without you? What strange breath
Shall my days draw, what strange blood feed my life
When this life that is love is gone from them

And this light lost?'*

Whoso does not feel this, let minute to Cleopatra and her In nine-tenths of Swinburne's verse there is something of the same note as in the lines just quoted-a straining after passion, an effort to be strong which has deceived many of the elect. The very width of Swinburne's literary sympathies, at any rate the ease with which he could rouse a seeming enthusiasm, was no good sign. Professor Saintsbury is apt to assume, not without arrogance, that if some poet who pleases him does not please his reader the fault must lie with the latter, that he is hard to 'please or (with pardon) not worth pleasing.' But there must always be individual tastes, and to take delight in everything is to care greatly for nothing:

him go back but for one halfcurled Antony.'

'She liked whate'er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.'

That may be pretty for a girl just entering life, not for a man with matured tastes. That Goethe failed to see merit in Hugo and Coleridge in Tennyson, surely these things take away all prerogative from a gift of indiscriminate or even of wide admiration?

Now, out of the sum of Swinburne's achievement it is the rapid verse of the kind which is foreshadowed by When the 'hounds of Spring' chorus-it is this that has survived as his chief prosodic gift to us. How successfully it has survived we see written all over the pages of Mr. Kipling's verse, and again in the second degree in that of Mr. Kipling's imitators, such as Mr. Newbolt. This is a sign of what might be described literally as phonetic decay' in our language: a sign that along with what we may optimistically call the broadening' of taste in all matters, there has gone a similar broadening' of aural sensibility. It is almost certain that of anyone who has been really captured' by this literature the ear would no longer rightly respond to the delicacies of great blank verse whether of the dramatists or of Milton, nor to the best of our

*Bothwell, act iv. sc. 3.

lyric. And fine as is Professor Saintsbury's critical sense and just his ear, we suspect that even he has been affected rather injuriously by his early admirations in poetry-by Tennyson to some extent, by Swinburne much more. To the Caroline lyricists he gives, we think, more laud than is their due, seeing that all things are by comparison. And we are sure that he is too enthusiastic over the In Memoriam' metre. We are not convinced that this metre has in se any advantage over the common measure,' or that the charm it possesses comes from aught else than its novelty. So if In Memoriam' metre ever became as hackneyed as 'common measure' has done, it would lose its charm, save (like common measure) in the great examples. There is little if any 'sweep' in this metric form, carrying us forward, will we, nil we, such as there is in the Spenserian stanza. On the contrary, anything like a long narrative would, we believe, be intolerable in 'in-memoriams.' Tennyson saves his position by cutting up his poem into a series of short reflective observations. Some of these are indeed exquisite, some of those to which the expression reflectiveobservation' best applies, such as the old yew' passage. But when we have the reflection without the observation, i.e. not enfolded, as one may say, in some immediate outward experience, the verse is far less happy. Few nowadays can defend That each who seems a separate whole,' etc., or the entire canto which it begins, and that ends and sinks so tamely where it ought to rise

Now, the fault of such passages, the weakness of 'In Memoriam' as a whole (beautiful passages apart), and of the Idylls' and of Tennyson's blank verse narratives on the whole, has one and the same origin-want of passion in the poet, want of a passionate hold even on Nature. Tennyson rises to greatness when he expresses the trained yet true emotions (patriotic and other) of the English gentleman (A land of just and old renown'), rarely in things quite personal and individual. Save once, in Maud,' he seems in the region of love to follow very closely the Keats tradition, which is dreamlike. If we are to have a true, and that means a justly balanced history of English prosody, we are bound to take note of these defects in the moderns, and not let mere perspective magnify what is near and belittle what is past. Of Browning it is not possible to take account alongside of Tennyson and Swinburne; for in a large degree Browning is like the Emperor Sigismund supra

grammaticam, above prosody. He would have to begin with a new study of that technique, who attempted to do justice to Browning.

Here we are obliged very unwillingly to part company with a subject of endless interest, and with Professor Saintsbury. The author of this History of English Prosody has given us the results of great learning and of fine discrimination and sound understanding, which are of even more importance than learning. Some things he has settled for all time he has thoroughly based oův. The vitality of true music, true rhythm which in one age was of force to triumph over the bleakness of Skeltonism and in another over the aridity of Popedom, and to save the glory of English verse—this, which historians of rhythm are so apt to misunderstand, he understands. That he is needlessly pedantic is to be regretted, for this will turn away some readers from his admirable pages.

ART. II.-THE UNITED STATES AND THE TARIFF.

1. Republican Text Book for the Congressional Campaign, 1910. Issued by the Republican Congressional Committee. 1133 Broadway, New York.

2. Democratic Campaign Book for 1910. Published by the National Democratic Congressional Committee, Washington, D.C.

THERE was only one issue in the State and Congressional

elections in the United States in November 1910. In those States where Legislatures were elected which will in the winter of 1910-11 choose members of the Senate at Washington; and in all Congressional districts, the only issue was the PayneAldrich tariff. The Republican revision of the tariff in the extra session of Congress of 1909 was everywhere the issue; and never did an opposition at Washington secure a majority in the House of Representatives, and reduce the majority in the Senate, with less effort than at the elections in November last. In the new Congress, which will convene in December 1911, the Democratic majority in the House will be sixty-three. In the Senate, as the result of the State elections, there will be eight fewer Republicans than there are in the Senate as now constituted; and as a consequence new power will accrue to the Republican group known since the revision of the tariff as Insurgents.

The history of the agitation of 1906-8 which impelled Mr. Taft and the Republican leaders in the House and the Senate to reopen the tariff question, and the history of the revision itself, have been told in the pages of this Review [Article 10, No. 427 Edinburgh Review,Tariff Revision in the United States,' pp. 70-93; and Article 1, No. 430, The Revision of the United States Tariff,' pp. 269-302]; and to readers of the second of these articles the overwhelming defeat of the Republican party at the first election after the revision can scarcely have come as a surprise. Concerning the Payne-Aldrich Act, which was the work almost exclusively of Senators Aldrich and Lodge, and the stand-pat group of Republicans in the Senate, this statement was made in the issue of the Edinburgh Review for October 1909 :—

'About all that is good that can be said for the Tariff Act of 1909 is that it must constitute a new starting-point for a measure that shall end the corruption of the protective system as this corruption