he true
critical insight, and to most of us, I think, those glimpses of the lofty
nature of the writer which make the thing written a thing of worth in the
eyes of the few are merely invisible.

His Fame.

In thinking of Sidney, Ophelia's lament for Hamlet springs to the lips,
and the heart reverts to that closing scene at Zutphen with a blessed
sadness of admiration and regret. But frankly, is it not a fact that
that fine last speech of his has more availed to secure him immortality
than all his verse? They call him the English Bayard, and the Frenchman
need not be displeasured by the comparison. But when you come to read
his poetry you find that our Bayard had in him a strong dash of the
pedant and a powerful leaven of the euphuist. Subtle, delicate, refined,
with a keen and curious wit, a rare faculty of verse, a singular capacity
of expression, an active but not always a true sense of form, he wrote
for the few, and (it may be) the few will always love him. But his
intellectual life, intense though it were, was lived among shadows and
abstractions. He thought deeply, but he neither looked widely nor
listened intently, and when all is said he remains no more than a
brilliant amorist, too super-subtle for complete sincerity, whose fluency
and sweetness have not improved with years.

TOURNEUR

His Style.

Tourneur was a fierce and bitter spirit. The words in which he unpacked
his heart are vitalised with passion. He felt so keenly that oftentimes
his phrase is the offspring of the emotion, so terse and vigorous and
apt, so vivid and so potent and eager, it appears. As an instance of
this avidity of wrath and scorn finding expression in words the fittest
and most forcible, leaving the well-known scenes embalmed in Elia's
praise, one might take the three or four single words in which Vindici
(_The Revenger's Tragedy_), on as many several occasions, refers to the
caresses of Spurio and the wanton Duchess. Each is of such amazing
propriety, is so keenly discriminated, is so obviously the product of an
imagination burning with rage and hate, that it strikes you like an
affront: each is an incest taken in the fact and branded there and then.
And this quality of verbal fitness, this power of so charging a phrase
with energy and colour as to make it convey the emotion of the writer at
the instant of inspiration, is perhaps the master quality of Tourneur's
work.

His Matter.

They that