umanity. We have
only space for a few lines from the magnificent _Ode to Actuality_:--

"'Prone in the caverns of the vasty deep
I lay,
And slept not, though I seemed to sleep.
The day
Pierced not with sullen eyes of pallid scorn
The dark,
Unplumbed abyss, where, girt with red limbs torn.
The shark
Sported, and eyeless monsters crawled in slime--'

"No extract can, however, convey an adequate idea of this grand poem,
on which, as on the bed rock, Mr. CHEPSTOWE's fame is established for
ever, SHAKSPEARE himself might have been proud to have written it."
I may remark, parenthetically, that in his "Ode" CHEPSTOWE pictured
himself as a sort of animate skeleton:--

"Sockets where light once shone grinned emptiness;
The teeth
Were fallen from the gaping, gumless jaws; nathless
Beneath
The cold smooth skull, the brain retained her throne."

Amid these uncomfortable surroundings CHEPSTOWE described himself as
penetrated with raptures of fierce joy at having shaken himself free
from the world and its puling insincerities to dwell amid "Unpitying
shapes of death's dread twin despair," where "Rapine and slaughter
raged, and none rebuked." Another reviewer observed that "The soul of
ARCHER's, the tavern-brawler's glorious victim, KIT MARLOWE, has taken
again a habitation of clay. She speaks trumpet-tongued by the mouth
of Mr. CHEPSTOWE. We note in these outpourings of dramatic passion
an audacity, an energy, an enthusiasm, that are calculated to shake
Peckham Rye to its centre, and make Balham tremble in its ridiculous
carpet slippers. Who--to take only one example--but Mr. CHEPSTOWE or
MARLOWE could have written thus of 'Rapture'?--

"'Not in the mouths of prating men who deem
That God dwells in the senseless clay they mould,
Who live their little lives and die their deaths,
Lapped in a smug respectability;
Who never dreamt of breaking puny laws
Formed for a puny race of grovellers;
But in the blood-stained track of flaming swords,
Wielded by knotty arms in Man's despite,
Or on the wings of crashing battle-balls,
Bone-shattering dealers of a thousand wounds,
The roaring heralds of indignant God,
There rapture dwells, and there I too would dwell.'

"Here is power that would furnish forth a whole legion of the
poetasters who crawl through our effete literature!" But I cannot
pursue these memories. They are