tion,' whom, he tells us
elsewhere, he is anxious to initiate into the great comprehensive truth
that 'Virtue is no other than self-interest, deeply understood.' In
order to further this laudable aim he has written a very tedious blank
verse poem which he calls The Secret of Content, but it certainly does
not convey that secret to the reader. It is heavy, abstract and prosaic,
and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions
and the most earnest beliefs. In the rest of the volume, where Mr. Catty
does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing
things. The sonnet on Shelley's room at University College would be
admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.

Green in the wizard arms
Of the foam-bearded Atlantic,
An isle of old enchantment,
A melancholy isle,
Enchanted and dreaming lies;
And there, by Shannon's flowing
In the moonlight, spectre-thin,
The spectre Erin sits.

Wail no more, lonely one, mother of exile wail no more,
Banshee of the world--no more!
Thy sorrows are the world's, thou art no more alone;
Thy wrongs the world's--

are the first and last stanzas of Mr. Todhunter's poem The Banshee. To
throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is, as Mr.
Swinburne once remarked, a wilful abdication of half the power and half
the charm of verse, and we cannot say that Mr. Todhunter has given us
much that consoles us for its loss. Part of his poem reads like a
translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for
poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose. It is an interesting
specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art. It is
amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems,
The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of
Turann. Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to song, and though
the lovely lute-builded walls of Thebes may have risen up to unrhymed
choral metres, we have had no modern Amphion to work such wonders for us.
Such a verse as--

Five were the chiefs who challenged
By their deeds the Over-kingship,
Bov Derg, the Daghda's son, Ilbrac of Assaroe,
And Lir of the White Field in the plain of Emain Macha;
And after them stood up Midhir the proud, who reigned
Upon the hills of Bri,
Of Bri the loved of Liath, Bri of the broken heart;
And last was Angus Og; all these had ma