The King's Bell. By Richard Henry Stoddard. (Basil Montagu Pickering.)—The
style of this poem reminds tho reader of the quaint, direct simplicity of Crabbe. There is the same frequent use of the Alexandrine and occasional baldness :— "No king of all his race so shrewd as he, So great a master of diplomacy."
Of this, however, we are not inclined to complain in days when poetry is supposed to consist in laboured description. Mr. Stoddard has written a simple yet interesting story in good sterling verse, and if he is occa- sionally open to the charge of baldness it is always in the narrative, where it is a fault on the right side, and not in the descriptive portions. He always writes with true and unexaggerated feeling, and he has chosen a really poetical subject—one, that is, which is not a novel in verse— not a tale which would have been at least as interesting in prose, but which owes its interest to its poetical form and treatment. As for the moral, we do not pretend to understand it, unless King Felix is to be regarded as one of those exceptional characters whose constitutional love of excitement renders them incapable of happiness. But if so, he could not have lived the life he did ; if not, his latter years must have been happy. A moral, however, happily is not necessarily a part of an enjoyable poem.
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