s it is one of omniscience, sometimes of blind perplexity. At
one time he describes the inmost thoughts of his characters which are
suffered or pursued in secret, as though he could see through
everything. At another time he will startle the reader with some such
question as this: "Who shall dare to say--I certainly cannot--what at
that solemn moment the lad's real reflections were?" A partial escape
from the sense of unreality which alternations like these produce is to
be found in the method which many novelists have adopted--namely, that
of dividing the story into so many separate parts, these being told in
succession by so many different characters, each recording events as
wholly seen from the point of his own unchanged perspective. Such is the
method adopted by Wilkie Collins in _The Woman in White_, for example.
The danger of this artifice is that it tends to be too apparent. The
most logically complete escape from the difficulties which we are here
glancing at is to be found, no doubt, in the method of autobiography in
a single and undivided form; unless indeed the assumption of absolute
omniscience on the author's part can be used with a rigid consistency
which it very rarely exhibits.

Another question of a purely literary kind, reflection on which is to
me, at least, pleasurable (though many persons of literary taste may,
perhaps, regard it as a bore), is the relation of modern prosody to
ancient, and more particularly to Latin. It has always seemed to me that
the lengthening and shortening of syllables according to their position,
as happens in classical Latin, with regard to the syllables that follow
them, must always have corresponded with the stresses or absence of
stress which would naturally be made apparent by the voice of an ideal
reciter; and to me, as to some other people, the question has proved
amusing of how far in English verse Latin prosody could be reproduced.
Many attempts have been made at deciding this question by experiments.
The most remarkable of these are two which were made by Tennyson. One of
them, called "Hendecasyllabics," is little more than a trick played with
extreme skill, and in no serious sense does it merit the name of poetry.
The other, "An Ode to Milton," is no less charming as a poem than as a
conquest over technical difficulties. Let us take the first stanza:

Oh, mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies,
Oh, skilled to sing of time and eternity,
God-gifted org