BOOKS.

A NEW ANTHOLOGY.*

Quuzza-Concs's name is a sufficient certificate that the anthology which he has edited for the Clarendon Press is

a competent piece of work. And a cursory inspection shows that the obvious masterpieces are all here. The interest begins when we examine into the differentia of this from other antho- logies equally competent. The first peculiarity to strike us is that Mr. Couch begins earlier than others and comes down later. He opens with the "Cuckoo Song," preserved in the manu- script of a monk of Reading along with the famous canon to which it is set, and follows on with "Between Marshe and Averil," "Lenten is come with love to tonne" and " Ichot a burde in bowere briht," a poem which has a burden far finer than itself :— " Blow northern wind!

Send thou me my sweating; Blow northern wind, blow, blow, blow!"

In this section the only poem of first-class merit that we miss is a lullaby, in Walter Map's metre, of which the first verse runs thus :— " Lollai, lollai, litel child, why wepist thou so sore ? Nedist must thou wepe, it was iyarked thee yore, Ever to live in sorrow and sigh and monrne evere As thine eldren did ere this, while they olives were. Lollai, lollai, litel child, child Iasi. billow Into uncouth world yeomen so art thou."

Of the early carols Mr. Couch picks the finest, "I sing of a maiden that is makeles " ; and he has a sixteenth-century burden that has come down in several slightly different forms, which we have long been convinced was in Tennyson's mind when he wrote the germinal stanzas of "Maud " "0, western wind, when wilt thou blow that the small rain down can rain? Christ, that my love were in my arms, And I in my bed again."

The representation of Wyatt is adequate, but with Surrey we are less satisfied. He was the first writer in English of the smooth vers de socitite, and sometimes he is as smooth as Waller, while he has more to say. We should have been glad to see here the piece entitled "The lover comforteth himself with the worthiness of his love," with its magnificent second and third stanzas, and if room had to be made for this and another we would gladly have dispensed with the company of Nicholas Grimald and Robert Weyer and the bacchanalian Bishop of Bath and Wells. Indeed, all the bacchanal poems might well have been omitted, as they do not sort well with general society. The selection from the Elizabethan miscel- lanies, and the song-books which Mr. Bullen made accessible, seems about as good as it can be. It includes what seems to the present writer the finest of all the anonymous pieces, "I 89,97 my lady weep " ; but there are still a few exquisite trifles that space might easily have been found for, such as "April is in my mistress' face," and "Brown is my love, but graceful." We miss also a specimen of "A. W.," the anonymous poet of Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, whose muse so curiously anticipated some of the effects of Mr. Robert Bridges.

With Spenser and Sidney one would say it was impossible to go wrong, did one not remember that The Golden Treasury was long without Sidney's "Philomela," and even now lacks the serenade from " Astrophel and Stella " ; but Mr. Couch has both. Of the songs from the dramatists we should have preferred a little more Greene and Peele, and a little less Lodge. Lodge was at best a clever amateur, and his verses do not bear critical examination. Peele's snatches of song are

only less magical than Shakespeare's. Of Drayton Mr. Couch prints the great sonnet, the Agincourt ballad, the Virginia voyage, and a passage from the "Muse's Elizium," besides the humorous stanzas "To his coy love," and this is fair measure;

to Drayton's friend, Samuel Daniel, on the other hand, he does less than justice. And this is the more surprising as Mr. Couch is one of the few living enthusiasts for this excel- lent master. We would gladly have spared half-a-dozen of the sonnets, of which there are not a few collections, for one

of the fine choruses from the "Cleopatra" 4.44 .the little = philosophical poem in "Tethys' Festival," which- opens "Are

they shadows that we see," and there is no reason why we

• The Word Boa of Engliah, Verse (1g60-.1a001 eltbsea and 4W * A. T. Quillei-Coueli. Oxford ; Clarendon Press. Ch. 6d.]

should not have been allowed the famous passage from "Hymen's Triumph" about first love, "Ah, I remember well."

To the selection from Campion we should have added "When to her lute Corinna sings," and perhaps "Kind are her answers " ; but any one who wishes to see at a glance how Mr. Couch

ranks as a critic in respect to Mr. Palgrave should compare their treatment of Campion. We are entirely with Mr. Couch. William Browne and George Wither are well treated, though from Wither we should have liked to see the famous passage about poetry from the fourth eclogue of the "Shepherd's Hunting " ; and, as Mr. Couch allows of extracts, we looked in vain under Fletcher for the lyrical choruses from "The Faithful Shepherdess," an almost un- pardonable omission. Herrick is well selected; so are Herbert, and Carew, and Vaughan (though we could have spared "My soul, there is a country "), and Marvell. Cowley and Waller, on the other hand, get less than their due Waller's fame has suffered too great a reaction from his con- temporary eminence, and he is known to the present genera- tion only by the three pieces given here, two of which are so hackneyed that they are past giving pleasure to any but the very young. Waller's stock-in-trade was a small one, but there are half-a-dozen short lyrics well worth reviving, any one of which, as they all preach the same moral as "Go, lovely rose," might be allowed to take its place for a time. And then there are the delightful verses, "To a very young lady." In not selecting from Cowley with more care- Mr. Couch seems to us to have missed a great opportunity.

Between these giants and heroes, and the fine gentlemen "that wrote with ease" who follow, Mr. Couch interposes a sheaf of ballads. Then come Gray, and Collins, and Blake. As to Blake, Mr. Couch's selection is much better than Mr. Palgrave's, but it does not reach the ideal. Where is " 0 rose, thou art sick" ? where are the two Jerusalem songs, and "How sweet I roamed from field to field " ? The sheaf of poems from Burns will probably content all Southrons, though nothing, of course, but the whole Burns will content your Northern enthusiast. From Wordsworth we are given the " Lucy " poems, "The Solitary Reaper," the "Daffodils," "She was a phantom of delight," "The Rainbow," the two great odes, and certain great sonnets ; from Coleridge, "The Ancient Mariner," "Kahle Khan," "Love," "Youth and Age," "Time, Real and Imaginary," and "Work without Hope " ; from Shelley, the "Hymn of Pan," "The. Invi- tation," "Hellas," the "Ode. to a Skylark," the "Ode to the West Wind," "The Indian Serenade," "Night,". "From the Arabic," "When the lamp is shattered," "One word is too often profaned," "The Question," "Remorse," and ," Music when soft voices die." It would be difficult to reduce this list by justifiable omissions, and probably only considerations of space prevented its being added to. But among the poems fromWprds- worth we should have welcomed "The Affliction of Margaret," and among those from Shelley "The golden gates of sleep unbar" and "A widow bird," a poem once included in The Golden Treasury, and banished in a recent edition to make room for some very dull stuff indeed. It is one of the hest examples in English of the power that poetry has of con- veying a mood by a conjunction of words which in their mere logical meaning do not express it. But from this point of time onward an anthology becomes of less use in regard to the bigger names, because those who care at all for poetry will ,know all the more important poems. We need not, therefore, stop to inquire what Mr. Couch has extracted from Tennyson, or the Brownings, or Matthew Arnold, or the Rossettis, though it gives one a start to find the sister of the last-named pair represented by eleven poems, the brother only by the ".Blessed Damozel." But where copyright holds, choice is perforce limited and in various degrees. In regard to the smaller people of one's own generation an anthology would be of the utmost service, and Mr. Couch's contribution to this is of very great interest, for he comes right down to the end of the century. It is to this quarter of the book that curiosity will naturally first turn, and the selection cannot fail to cause a good deal of fluttering in poetical_dovecotes. Nor is the generai. reader likely to receive what is offered him here in the spirit of humble thankfulness in which he takes 4r., Couch's selections from the thirteenth century. The critic, too, for hill small Bart, is not likely to be pleaaet. Rb cannot but feel

the difference—the necessary difference perhaps—in the standard which in the bulk of the book rejects all but the bsst work of the few survivors during a space of five centuries, and in the last century welcomes the occasional pieces of many persons who will not be heard of fifty years hence. Moreover, the net being cast so wide, he asks why it is cast no wider. Some of the omissions seem accidental. Where, for example, are Frederic Myers and R. W. Dixon? The only Philips here is Katherine, who is an inconsiderable poet, far inferior in merit to Stephen of that name. Still, future editions will, no doubt, give Mr. Couch the opportunity to reconsider omissions of this kind, which are likely to be brought on many hands to his notice. Meanwhile, it is fair to recognise that he has made the first attempt at a task which has some day to be faced, and is full of difficulty; and the very sight of some of the names on his page--Sydney Dobell, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Alexander Smith—is a reminder that criticism has not yet said its final word about them.