asked, it seems by Mont. Butler to translate into verse (Latin) as I into Greek verse Lord Carlisle's lines about Lady St. German's tree- the tiny thing is called 'Flebilis Arbor' I think I never read such good biographical writing as Seeley's reminiscences of Calverley

Some anonymous poet has sent to anonymous me through Geo. Allen, a libellus of 20 pages called 'Backslider' by Antæous, printed (100 copies) for the author sold by Elkin Mathews Vigo Street W They are more interesting to me than the lately lent volumes of Robert Bridges and Mrs Woods, but far less than Sir Alfred Lyall's.

"To a dead Mistress' seems to me original and clever, and it might have been printed in a magazine

A friend of mine seems to have resumed an old project that he and I made long ago, to print a set of poems

of all sorts of writers for barrack libraries under the title Sabretasch and I have just tried to remember the things about soldiership that I have read Amongst these are two written by my Cambridge friend Frankland Lushington who was in [word illegible] and perhaps still isto my disgust his 'Cabul' did not get the Chancellor's medal

I am dear Sir

Yours sincerely

WM. CORY

Would you like to have a note written by Sir Richard Burton, he was worth seeing... ten years ago

LORD DE TABLEY 1

JOHN BYRNE, LEICESTER WARREN, who became Lord de Tabley in 1887, was born in 1835 and died in 1895. His first volume of poems appeared in 1859, and he was publishing until the time of his death. His period was, therefore, Victorian without qualification, and no stranger coming to his work with a knowledge of English poetry could fail to recognize in it clear marks of the age of Tennyson and Browning and Morris and Swinburne and Arnold. His reputation has never been, nor is it ever likely to be, with theirs. His mastery of the muse was far too inconstant a thing to give him place in the forefront of an age, but, at his best, he was not merely a small poet imitating these greater ones with talent, but an authentic maker drawing his variable inspiration from the same sources that worked in the masters of the time to an ampler though not always a richer gathering.

In the case of the foremost men it is, when all is said, idle to dispute whether one age is greater than another in poetry. Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, for example you may like one better than another, and have very good reasons for

your

1 Prefixed to Select Poems of Lord de Tabley. (Humphrey Milford, 1924.)

liking, but that is about all there is to be said in this matter of degree. The great poets have this in common, that most of the time their work, so to speak, comes off. To follow these four instances, in spite of a great deal of nonsense that is talked about Wordsworth by people who do not read him, and, for that matter, about the other three as well, no one who really cares for poetry, and patiently gives himself to the understanding of a poet like any of these four, seriously wishes any considerable volume of his work away. One is not talking of the dilettante readers in poetry, who have a perfectly legitimate taste merely for a lyric here and there, but of those others who believe that in the poetic canon of their race is to be found at once the most interesting and inspiring expression of that race's spirit. The great poet's life is always and steadfastly preoccupied with his poetry, and when a man like Milton set about writing a poem it was found more likely than not to be a good one, and, if the reader does not see it, it is, at least, as likely as not that Milton is right and he is wrong. So that, again to speak of these four, we shall find that each of them brought all the resources of a rich and powerful nature to the accomplishment of a great life's aim in poetry, and that each of them succeeded. That Tennyson's particular kind of verse was not Pope's, nor Pope's Milton's, does not matter. In each case the great work was done and

the account closed. We may call Milton a greater poet than Tennyson if we like, but Milton would laugh at us.

When, however, we come to the smaller men the case is altered. The difference between a poet like de Tabley, for example, and a poet like Tennyson is not that Tennyson reaches an excellence altogether beyond de Tabley's range, but that Tennyson does it twenty times for de Tabley's once, and that, moreover, at one sitting, as it were, Tennyson will do it consistently and de Tabley but fitfully. Inspiration remains the best word, and inspiration is common in the one case and very occasional in the other. The result is that, now to particularize, in de Tabley's 'Collected Poems,' which fill five hundred closely printed pages in small type, there is an immense amount of waste tissue, and a public that can only know him through such a volume is little likely to have the patience to know him at all. This is an injustice to a poetic gift about which, when the tide was moving, there can be no question whatever. Critical opinion at the moment is rather at outs with even the Swinburnes and the Morrises and the Tennysons themselves, and possibly it may be even less ready to reconsider the claims of a lesser light from the firmament in which these were the stars of greater magnitude. Critical opinion of the moment about things of a moment ago, however, has a way of being very soon found

out, and this selection is put forward in the belief that less fashionable and more permanent judgment will be glad always to have the best of a poet who, for all his defects, could be very good indeed.

De Tabley belonged to an age in which the defects of its poetry were peculiarly troublesome. There are times when the poets even when they are not writing at their best do not necessarily write quite tediously. The elaborate and profuse vigour and sweetness of the Elizabethans may sometimes fall into an almost ludicrous disorder, but at their worst they still have the touch of divinity upon them. After Donne the poetry of the seventeenth century, varied as it was, has, nevertheless, for its governing characteristic that quality which has given it the term 'metaphysical.' That in its play of intellectual wit it disregarded the deeper things of passion is a belief obviously untenable by the witness of such names as Marvell and Vaughan and Crashaw and Herbert and Herrick, to say nothing of Milton or of a dozen other known, and many hardly known, names. there was in the work of all that age a certain simple fundamental quality of brain that seemed to save almost the smallest talent, no matter into what fantastic excesses it might fall, from mere dullness. One can read through volume after volume of forgotten verse books of the time and pass from admiration to every kind of reaction but

But