icisms upon other poets at all more felicitous.
The casual allusion to Herrick's 'confectioneries of verse' is, of
course, quite explicable, coming as it does from an editor who excluded
Herrick from an anthology of the child-poems of our literature in favour
of Mr. Ashby-Sterry and Mr. William Sharp, but when Mr. Robertson tells
us that Poe's 'loftiest flights of imagination in verse . . . rise into
no more empyreal realm than the fantastic,' we can only recommend him to
read as soon as possible the marvellous lines To Helen, a poem as
beautiful as a Greek gem and as musical as Apollo's lute. The remarks,
too, on Poe's critical estimate of his own work show that Mr. Robertson
has never really studied the poet on whom he pronounces such glib and
shallow judgments, and exemplify very clearly the fact that even
dogmatism is no excuse for ignorance.

After reading Mr. Hall Caine's Coleridge we are irresistibly reminded of
what Wordsworth once said about a bust that had been done of himself.
After contemplating it for some time, he remarked, 'It is not a bad
Wordsworth, but it is not the real Wordsworth; it is not Wordsworth the
poet, it is the sort of Wordsworth who might be Chancellor of the
Exchequer.' Mr. Caine's Coleridge is certainly not the sort of Coleridge
who might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the author of
Christabel was not by any means remarkable as a financier; but, for all
that, it is not the real Coleridge, it is not Coleridge the poet. The
incidents of the life are duly recounted; the gunpowder plot at
Cambridge, the egg-hot and oronokoo at the little tavern in Newgate
Street, the blue coat and white waistcoat that so amazed the worthy
Unitarians, and the terrible smoking experiment at Birmingham are all
carefully chronicled, as no doubt they should be in every popular
biography; but of the spiritual progress of the man's soul we hear
absolutely nothing. Never for one single instant are we brought near to
Coleridge; the magic of that wonderful personality is hidden from us by a
cloud of mean details, an unholy jungle of facts, and the 'critical
history' promised to us by Mr. Walter Scott in his unfortunate preface is
conspicuous only by its absence.

Carlyle once proposed in jest to write a life of Michael Angelo without
making any reference to his art, and Mr. Caine has shown that such a
project is perfectly feasible. He has written the life of a great
peripatetic philosopher and chroni