eir neat intelligence? This
poem, with the exceptions of some episodes of noble poetry, is, as well
as the three others, a very harlequinade of the intellect.

I may say, though this is hypercritical, that the name of Don Juan is a
mistake. Every one knows Don Juan, and to imagine him arguing in the
fashion of this poem is absurd. He would instantly, without a word, have
left Elvire, and abandoned Fifine in a few days. The connection then of
the long discussions in the poem with his name throws an air of
unreality over the whole of it. The Don Juan of the poem had much better
have stayed with Elvire, who endured him with weary patience. I have no
doubt that he bored Fifine to extinction.

The poems that follow these four volumes are mixed work, half
imaginative, half intellectual. Sometimes both kinds are found,
separated, in the same poem; sometimes in one volume half the poems will
be imaginative and the other half not. Could the imaginative and
intellectual elements have now been fused as they were in his earlier
work, it were well; but they were not. They worked apart. His witful
poems are all wit, his analytical poems are all analysis, and his
imaginative poems, owing to this want of fusion, have not the same
intellectual strength they had in other days. _Numpholeptos_, for
instance, an imaginative poem, full too of refined and fanciful emotion,
is curiously wanting in intellectual foundation.

The _Numpholeptos_ is in the volume entitled _Pacchiarotto, and how he
worked in Distemper_. Part of the poems in it are humorous, such as
_Pacchiarotto_ and _Filippo Baldinucci_, excellent pieces of agreeable
wit, containing excellent advice concerning life. One reads them, is
amused by them, and rarely desires to read them again. In the same
volume there are some severe pieces, sharply ridiculing his critics. In
the old days, when he wrote fine imaginative poetry, out of his heart
and brain working together, he did not mind what the critics said, and
only flashed a scoff or two at them in his creation of Naddo in
_Sordello_. But now when he wrote a great deal of his poetry out of his
brain alone, he became sensitive to criticism. For that sort of poetry
does not rest on the sure foundation which is given by the consciousness
the imagination has of its absolute rightness. He expresses his needless
soreness with plenty of wit in _Pacchiarotto_ and in the _Epilogue_,
criticises his critics, and displays his good opinion of