e cannot do with it. Listen to these lines
from _Mary Stuart_:

She shall be a world's wonder to all time,
A deadly glory watched of marvelling men
Not without praise, not without noble tears,
And if without what she would never have
Who had it never, pity--yet from none
Quite without reverence and some kind of love
For that which was so royal.

There is in them something of the cadence of Milton and something of the
cadence of Shakespeare, and they are very Swinburne. Yet, after reading
_Locrine_, and with _Atalanta_ and _Erechtheus_ in memory, it is
difficult not to wish that Swinburne had written all his plays in
rhyme, and that they had all been romantic plays and not histories.
_Locrine_ has been acted, and might well be acted again. Its rhyme would
sound on the stage with another splendour than the excellent and
well-sounding rhymes into which Mr. Gilbert Murray has translated
Euripides. And there would be none of that difficulty which seems to be
insuperable on the modern stage: the chorus, which, whether it speaks,
or chants, or sings, seems alike out of place and out of key.

The tragic anecdote which Swinburne has told in _Rosamund, Queen of the
Lombards_, is told with a directness and conciseness unusual in his
dramatic or lyric work. The story, simple, barbarous, and cruel--a story
of the year 573--acts itself out before us in large clear outlines, with
surprisingly little of modern self-consciousness. The book is a small
one, the speeches are short, and the words for the most part short too;
every speech tells like an action in words; there is scarcely a single
merely decorative passage from beginning to end. Here and there the
lines become lyric, as in

Thou rose,
Why did God give thee more than all thy kin,
Whose pride is perfume only and colour, this?
Music? No rose but mine sings, and the birds
Hush all their hearts to hearken. Dost thou hear not
How heavy sounds her note now?

But even here the lyrical touch marks a point of 'business.' And for the
most part the speeches are as straightforward as prose; are indeed
written with a deliberate aim at a sort of prose effect. For instance:

ALMACHILDES.

God must be
Dead. Such a thing as thou could never else
Live.

ROSAMUND.

That con