first order of poets lies. He was, it is evident, a man of
the greatest talent, even of great genius, who, coming at the end of a long
literary movement, exemplified the defects of its decadence. I could
compare him, if there was here any space for such a comparison, to
Baudelaire or Flaubert with some profit; except that he never had
Baudelaire's perfect sense of art, and that he does not seem, like
Flaubert, to have laid in, before melancholy marked him for her own, a
sufficient stock of living types to save him from the charge of being a
mere study-student. There is no Frederic, no M. Homais, in his repertory.
Even Giovanni--even Orgilus, his two masterpieces, are, if not exactly
things of shreds and patches, at any rate artificial persons, young men who
have known more of books than of life, and who persevere in their eccentric
courses with almost more than a half knowledge that they are eccentric.
Annabella is incomplete, though there is nothing, except her love,
unnatural in her. The strokes which draw her are separate imaginations of a
learned draughtsman, not fresh transcripts from the living model. Penthea
and Calantha are wholly artificial; a live Penthea would never have thought
of such a fantastic martyrdom, unless she had been insane or suffering from
green-sickness, and a live Calantha would have behaved in a perfectly
different fashion, or if she had behaved in the same, would have been quit
for her temporary aberration. We see (or at least I think I see) in Ford
exactly the signs which are so familiar to us in our own day, and which
repeat themselves regularly at the end of all periods of distinct literary
creativeness--the signs of _excentricite voulue_. The author imagines that
"all is said" in the ordinary way, and that he must go to the ends of the
earth to fetch something extraordinary. If he is strong enough, as Ford
was, he fetches it, and it _is_ something extraordinary, and we owe him,
with all his extravagance, respect and honour for his labour. But we can
never put him on the level of the men who, keeping within ordinary limits,
achieve masterpieces there.

Ford--an Elizabethan in the strict sense for nearly twenty years--did not
suffer from the decay which, as noted above, set in in regard to
versification and language among the men of his own later day. He has not
the natural trick of verse and phrase which stamps his greatest
contemporaries unmistakably, and even such lesser ones as his coll