e grown familiar in the hands of Dobson, Lang, Gosse, and
others. In the second series of "Poems and Ballads" (1878) he gave
translations of ten of the ballads of that musical old blackguard

"Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name." [66]

The range of Swinburne's intellectual interests has been wider than that
of Rossetti and Morris. He is a classical scholar, who writes easily in
Latin and Greek. Ancient mythology and modern politics divide his
attention with the romantic literatures of many times and countries.
Rossetti made but one or two essays in prose criticism, and Morris viewed
the reviewer's art with contempt. But Swinburne has contributed freely
to critical literature, an advocate of the principles of romantic art in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Coleridge, Lamb, and
Hazlitt had been in the first. The manner of his criticism is not at all
judicial. His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame
both in excess--dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. In
particular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard that it loses
meaning. Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to the
cool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to be
full of insight, and his judgment in matters of poetical technique almost
always right. I may close this chapter with a few sentences of his
defence of retrospective literature.[67] "It is but waste of breath for
the champions of the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast off
the bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turn
from the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or romantic,
classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we live. . . . In vain, for
instance, do the first poetess of England and the first poet of America
agree to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty of
confronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time,
its meaning, and its need. . . . If a poem cast in the mould of classic
or feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval romance, be lifeless and
worthless, it is not because the subject or the form was ancient, but
because the poet was inadequate. . . . For neither epic nor romance of
chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there is
nothing in the past extinct . . . [Life] is omnipresent and eternal, and
forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor
Crusader, t