zled to
comprehend why the reviewers were scandalised. He trampled with
sarcasm and scorn upon canting critics, and retorted that the prurient
prudery of their own minds suggested the impurities which they found
in works of pure art. There is nothing, he insists, lovelier, as there
is nothing more famous in later Hellenic art, than the statue of
Hermaphroditus, yet his translation of a sculptured poem into written
verse has given offence! One might reply that a subject which is
irreproachable, on the score of purity, in cold marble, may take a
very different colour when it is dilated upon in burning verse.

The controversy had its humorous side; but we have no intention of
stirring up again the smoke and fire of battles fought long ago. Mr.
Swinburne held his ground defiantly, and the appearance of _Songs and
Ballads_, published in 1871, showed no signs of contrition, or of
concession to inveterate prejudices. In the course of the intervening
five years the empire of Napoleon III. had fallen with a mighty
crash; Italy had been united under one Italian dynasty; Garibaldi had
become famous, and the Papal States had been absorbed into the Italian
kingdom. This volume, which was dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, shows the
ardent enthusiasm for the triumph of liberty, intellectual and
political, which runs through all Mr. Swinburne's poetry. The 'Song of
the Standard,' the 'Halt before Rome,' the 'Marching Song,' the
'Insurrection of Candia,' are poems that reflect current events; and
the 'Litany of Nations' is the national anthem of peoples striving for
freedom. But his verse rises to its highest pitch of exultation in the
glorification of emancipation of Man. The final line of the 'Hymn to
Man' is

'Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things';

and in one stanza of 'Hertha' is condensed all the wild declamation
against deities and despots that pervades his poetry at this stage,
with his joy in the deification of humanity:

'A creed is a rod,
And a crown is of night;
But this thing is God,
To be man with thy might,
To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life
As the light.'

There are no love-lyrics in this volume. He now stands forth as the
uncompromising enemy of established religions, a fierce assailant of
tyrannies, spiritual or temporal, an iconoclast who denounces churches