THE minor poet of to-day is more happily fated than

his early Victorian cousin. His verses are, as a rule, admirably printed and prettily bound, while his unfortunate relative's were presented in the guise of a Sunday-school book with vulgar gilding and impossible type. In many ways he deserves his better fortune. He is more accomplished and more modest, he has a wider range in his themes, he has a better ear for rhymes and rhythms, and he rarely poses. Indeed, the amount of pleasant, scholarly, uninspired verse which is produced every year is a gratifying tribute to modern education; but it is also a little saddening to the critic. For with all its merits, it is so far from the real thing. We are not of the school which is intolerant of minor poetry. It is an ancient and honourable industry, and it has its degrees of excellence as well as other crafts. It gives pleasure to the maker of it, and very often may delight the reader ; but a cultured mind and considerable metrical talent do not take it out of its class. The antithesis of minor poetry is not great poetry, but simply poetry,—that evasive quality in thought or diction which arrests the mind with a sharp shock of pleasure, that something which is in- evitable and unforgettable. Mr. Yeats, for example, is not, to our mind, a great poet ; but no one would dream of calling him a minor poet. Poetry has its own Rata and heights within its domain, but it is always a tableland, and the minor poet is still toiling on the slopes. Sometimes he is clearly born to spend his life there; sometimes he is mounting upward, and gives every promise of soon reaching the crest; but we are entitled to judge him by his achievement, and not

• (1) Poems. By Alfred Noyes. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. [78. 6d. net.]—(2) Musa Verticordia. By Francis Coats. London : John Lane. [3s. 6d. net.1—(8) Queen Elisabeth: an Historical Drama. By W. G. Hole. London : George Bell and Sons. ps. 6d. net. j---(4) William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher: a Drama, By Richard Garnett. London : John [3s. M. net.3—(5) Sweetbrier: a Pastoral with Songs. By Dorothea Gore- Browne. London : Elkin Mathews. 1,2s. 6d. net. J —(6) Blanchelleur the Queen. By Ashmore Wingate. London : John Lane. [ai. net.]—(7) Humid the Luckless, and other Tales in Verse. By John Payne. London David Nutt. Da.]—(8) Sounds and Sweet Airs. By John Todhunter. London : Elkin Mathews. Cls. net.]—(9) Egyptian and other Verses. By George Cookson. London: Macmillan and Co. [4e. 6d. net-J—(16) The Book of the Bose : Poems. By Charles (3. D. Roberts. London : R Brimley Johnson. [Sa. 6d. net.1—(11) Sonnets of Sweet Sorrow. By David Lowe. Glasgow : F W Wilson and Co. 12a. net.]—(12) Loves Tribute: a Bonnet-Sequence. BY James Whitehea,t Edinburgh : T. N. Emilia. Ps. 6d. net.]

by his future. Of the contents of the twelve volumes before us, all except a very little seems to us to rank infallibly as minor poeCry.

Of the twelve writers, Mr. Noyes is the most remarkable, both in promise and performance, and but for a few graVe blemishes would deserve serious consideration as a poet. He has earnestness of spirit, a strong, if somewhat commonplace, imaginative vein, and a true ear for melody. His work con- sists of ballads, lyrics, and one or two longer poems of a reflective and speculative cast. As a ballad-writer he has moments of complete success, as, for example, in the opening poem, "Apes and Ivory," " Sherwood," " A Song of England," " The Song of the Wooden-Legged Fiddler," and "The Universalist."

Such poems have the true lilt and zest of the singer, and the echoes linger in the memory. But he bas as many complete failures, where the verses go to a mechanical, jigging tune, and the diction is as banal as the rhythm. On such occasions Mr. Noyes becomes the balladist—a very different thing and he only lacks a cheap tune to become a maker of drawing- room songs. The same criticism applies to his lyrics, some of which, like "The Dead Rival," have both music and imaginative power, while others go after this fashion:- " " When I wander by the water,

By the myriad-twinkling water, By the sunny laughing water of the sea

Where the little fishes tipple All the little fairy people's voices ripple, Ripple, ripple, Unto me,' — which is, to be sure, a kind of melody, but of the school of the barrel-organ. In his longer and staider poems, like "Earth- bound" and "A Night at Saint Helena," and such a fine rhapsody as "The Old Sceptic," he shows often a delicacy of thought and a subtlety of diction which the ballads have not prepared us for. Mr. Noyes's Muse is too copious and facile; he is too much in a hurry to catch an elusive senti- ment to trouble about style, with the result that sometimes the reader gets only a shell from which all virtue has gone.

He is too fond of old, stale poetic properties, too much under the bondage of tags from other men's work which help only to mar his lines, too confident that a flow of words covers a multitude of sins. His remarkable gift of melody is ao degraded by this vice that it produces, as a rule, only common and obvious effects. Let any one read Mr. Noyes's " Song of Exile," and then read Stevenson's version of " Wandering Willie," and he will see how little poignancy can be attained by a facile pen. At the same time, he has the stuff in him of which poets are made. In these niggardly days it seems hard to suggest the labour of the file, but this is precisely what Mr. Noyes's verse needs. Pruning, selection, self-criticism, a severe abstention from " gush " and all kindred weaknesses, may make poetry of what is now only attractive verse. How good he can be at times is shown by the delightful two verses into which he has distilled the essence of the famous song in La Prineesse Lointaine, by the noble "De Profundis," and, indeed, by any page in this volume where Mr. Noyes realises that only by taking thought can poetry be fashioned. He has great gifts of sympathy and tenderness, and it would be a thousand pities if these degenerated into sentimentality and an unprofitable mysticism.

Mr. Noyes's limitations may be summed up in some lines of the next poet, Mr. Coutts :—

" Faint ecstasies of pure religions faith,

The legend and the wraith, With birds and butterflies and dreams of gold,

The new dream and the old,—

This . . ..... . . is the Art, remote from sacred fires,

The common crowd admires."

In return, we may describe Mr. Contts's faults in words of Mr. Noyes,:--he has too much of " a sophist's pride in a graven image of truth." He has much that Mr. Noyes lacks,—extreme simplicity and chastity of style, what Stevenson has called "the piety of speech," a perfect taste, and an instinct for rendering in delicate poetry evasive moods and fancies. There is also a gravity and austerity which are a welcome relief from the undue luxuriance of much modern verse. But he is constantly in the bondage of a thing which he calls Truth, an abstraction which is at least as barren as those which he disclaims. His aim is to clothe thought in verse, but he gives us less thought than invocations to Thought. In his revolt from the commonplace he goes too far from humanity, and

and "Die Meistersinger " ; but we are ready to grant the success in their own way of such lyrics as " There shall be weeping" and "A little sequence." We like Mr. Coutts best when he is at his simplest, as in the delightful " Angling Days," which is an expression in simple musical verse of the commonest of human emotions, untinged by the slightly forced reflectiveness which seems to us to be a blemish in much of his work.

The next five volumes on our list are dramas and narrative poems, ranging in character from the ambitious purpose of Mr. Hole to the modest pastoral of Miss Gore-Browne. Mr.

Hole has taken for his subject Elizabeth's love for Leicester, and has devised a tragic consummation which is legitimate enough, though without historical warrant. It is on the whole a fine performance, excellent in plan and brilliant in execution. Again and again he reaches the height of true drama, and the verse is always scholarly and sometimes eloquent. He shows, too, a real insight into character, and his portrait of Elizabeth is worthy of being remembered ; while his minor people, courtiers, clowns, and mariners, are done with a gusto and humour which are truly Elizabethan.

Perhaps it lacks high poetic moments; for all its skill and orderliness, the breath of inspiration is rarely felt ; but Mr. Hole has done what few can do, and in writing drama has aimed at dramatic success and not at incidental fine writing. Queen Elizabeth should make a good acting play; and in any case the writer has established himself as one of the few literary dramatists of our day who are worth attention. Dr. Garnett's play on the poaching episode in Shakespeare's early life is rather the work of a scholar than a poet. It is all work at a high level, and the way in which the characters are made to speak in lines which are echoes of the later Shakespeare is extremely skilful. There is humour, too, in many of the scenes, and much accomplished verse. But it is rather a chapter of Mr. Sidney Lee's Life turned into dialogue than a substantive drama. Of Miss Gore-Browne's Sweetbriar there is little to say. It is a meritorious exercise in the pastoral convention where vice is punished and virtue rewarded to the accompaniment of pleasant lyrics. Mr. Wingate in Blanchejleur the Queen has made a bold attempt

to write the epic of Charlemagne and his Queen in a series of romances. All are good after an imitative fashion, and " The

Legend of Clerk Abelard " contains some fine descriptive passages. But the general effect is monotonous, owing to the lack of subtlety and variation in the blank verse. Some-

times, indeed, Mr. Wingate writes poetry, as when he compares Eginhard's flight through the forest to— "A company in a tapestry

Swelled with a summer breath on midnight walls In some lost castle."

Of Mr. Payne's tales we need only say that the merit of the stories he tells is not impaired by his skilful use of the rhymed couplet in the manner of Dryden.

Of the three volumes of lyrics, Dr. Todhunter's Sounds and Sweet Airs is by far the most pleasing. They consist of a set of verses intended to be a record of the impressions made or the fantasies inspired by certain musical compositions. There is some excellent musical criticism contained in these poems, which have so far caught the spirit of their subject that they have always an exquisite music of their own. In "Irish Melodies" Dr. Todhunter has written a lyric which must have haunted the minds of many beside the present writer since it appeared in the pages of a contemporary magazine :—

" A voice beside the dim enchanted river Out of the twilight, where the brooding trees Hear Shannon's Druid waters chant for ever Tales of dead Kings and Bards and Shanachies ; A girl's young voice out of the twilight, singing Old songs beside the legendary stream ;

A girl's clear voice, o'er the wan waters ringing, Beats with its wild wings at the gates of Dream.

The flagger-leaves whereon shy dewdrops glisten Aro swaying, swaying gently to the sound, The meadow-sweet and spearmint, as they listen, Breathe wistfully their wizard balm around ; And there, alone with her young heart and heaven, Thrnshlike she singe, and lets her voice go free, Her soul of all its hidden longing shriven Soars on wild wings with her wild melody." Mr. Cookson's Egyptian Verses are exactly what a cultivated man might be expected to write on such subjects as the Sphinx and the Nile. His reflections are what we look for, and his verse is rather the product of education than of any special inspiration. Generally we feel that he has no particular motive in writing, and we therefore like him best in such a sonnet as his " Consolations," where the thought is as old as the hills and has been rendered for all time in Paracelsus, but where the lines have the echo of a true cri du cceur. Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts has much of the real poetic stuff in him, but we prefer to look for it in his prose. All his verse is accomplished, his songs have music and passion, he writes of Nature as an intimate lover ; but something is lacking, some quality of distinction and power, to raise most of his work above the level of a hundred other books of the kind. " Shepherdess Fair" would be a fine poem if Mrs. Meynell had not written her "Lady of the Lambs." There is, however, one exquisite song, " When Mary the Mother Kissed the Child," which is almost sufficient of itself to establish Mr. Roberts's poetic caste.

Our list has dwindled to two little volumes of sonnets, neither of much merit. Mr. Whitehead, greatly daring, has written a sonnet-sequence, called Love's Tribute, on the old subject of courtship. The manner recalls The Angel in the House ; but Mr. Whitehead, though a fluent versifier, is wholly without distinction either of thought or style. With Mr. Lowe's Sonnets of Sweet Sorrow we confess we are disappointed. Some previous essays of his had prepared us for spirit, humour, and a kind of gusto of observation, which make for originality. But his sonnets are elaborate platitudes, and his verse is not even skilful. In attempting simplicity Mr. Lowe has achieved the commonplace, and only once, in the sonnet called " Come Cold, Come Death," does the homeliness which is his chief merit approach the confines of poetry.