exameters upon modern subjects:

Here for a moment stands in the light at the door of a playhouse,
One who is dignified, masterly, hard in the pride of his station;
Here too, the stateliest of matrons, sour in the pride of her station;
With them their daughter, sad-faced and listless, half-crushed to
their likeness.

He has every form of sincerity except the sincerity of the artist, a
defect that he shares with most of our popular writers.

(1) Love's Widowhood and Other Poems. By Alfred Austin. (Macmillan and
Co.)

(2) Poems and Translations. By W. J. Linton. (Nimmo.)

(3) Dante: a Dramatic Poem. By Heloise Durant. (Kegan Paul.)

(4) Father O'Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics. By A. P. Graves. (Swan
Sonnenschein and Co.)

(5) The Judgment of the City and Other Poems. (Swan Sonnenschein and
Co.)

MR. SWINBURNE'S LAST VOLUME

(Pall Mall Gazette, June 27, 1889.)

Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and
very poisonous poetry. Then he became revolutionary and pantheistic, and
cried out against those that sit in high places both in heaven and on
earth. Then he invented Marie Stuart and laid upon us the heavy burden
of Bothwell. Then he retired to the nursery and wrote poems about
children of a somewhat over-subtle character. He is now extremely
patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection
for the Tory party. He has always been a great poet. But he has his
limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, the entire lack of
any sense of limit. His song is nearly always too loud for his subject.
His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume
that now lies before us, conceals rather than reveals. It has been said
of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still
greater truth it may be said that Language is his master. Words seem to
dominate him. Alliteration tyrannises over him. Mere sound often
becomes his lord. He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes
unreal.

Let us turn to the poem on the Armada:

The wings of the south-west wind are widened; the breath of his
fervent lips,
More keen than a sword's edge, fiercer than fire, falls full on the
plunging ships.
The pilot is he of the northward flight, their stay and their
steersman he;
A helmsman clothed with the tempest, and girdled with strength to
constrain the sea.
And the h