are usually concerned with the tragic
situations that it can involve, though the comic aspect of sexual
infatuation occasionally provokes cynicism. In politics all these
poets are no friends to democracy or seething radicalism; they adore
liberty, yet they are votaries of law and order; they have a hatred of
misrule, and generally a cheerful confidence in the world's evolution
toward better things. On social ethics the poets of the mid-Victorian
period wrote with philosophic sobriety; they maintained a strict moral
standard. In their wildest emotional flights they abstained from
irreverence or indecorum. They undoubtedly represented the prevailing
cast of thought, the taste and tendencies of the society to which they
belonged; the growing scepticism, the influence on established ideas
of advancing science and philosophy. Literature had been showing
distinct signs of sympathy with these novelties, but in the early
'sixties an open revolt was generally discountenanced.

Mr. Swinburne's first publications were two historic plays, of which
something will be said hereafter. In 1864 he turned suddenly from
modern history to ancient legend for his dramatic subject, when he
aroused immediate attention by _Atalanta in Calydon_, which reproduced
the structure and metrical arrangement of a Greek tragedy. The
dialogue has the purity of tone, the clear-cut concision that belong
to its Hellenic model. At the beginning we have a joyous chant full of
sound and colour, gradually changing into the elegiac strain of
foreboding, the dread of pitiless divinities, the lamentation for the
hero's unmerited fate. The exquisite modulations of the verse, the
splendid choral antiphonies captivated all who were susceptible to the
enchantment of poetry. The delicate adaptation of the English language
to quantitative harmonies in high resonant lyrics showed extraordinary
skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and
cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in
style and character as the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came
_Chastelard_, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told
us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek
tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt,
for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions of
heroism than that of the love-sick knight who joyfully throws away his
life for an hour in his lady's chambe