Shakespeare) has come within measurable distance of expressing every
aspect of the human character. The Nawab could take pleasure in reading
poets as temperamentally dissimilar as Shelley and Scott, Spenser and
Byron,--to name only a few. Shelley, who was a spirit utterly unable to
understand this world or ordinary homespun human nature; and Scott, who
not only comprehended both without an effort, but who combined the
practical and the romantic elements successfully in his own life, A
devotion to Spenser, "the poet's poet," the poet of a dreamy yet very
real and living chivalry,--Spenser who used to forget himself in his
creations,--did not prevent the Nawab from understanding Byron, who
never could forget himself at all; and who, with all his vivid impulses
of generous sympathy for the oppressed, is nevertheless generally
classed to-day as a colossal egoist. (Unjustly so, for no mere egoist
would have toiled as he toiled for Greek emancipation, in the
nerve-racking campaign which cost him his life.)

In _India to England_--most characteristic of the war poems of Nizamat
Jung--we see traces of the influence of more than one of the English
poets he has read so lovingly. But the poem is none the less poignantly
personal. The same may be said of the Sonnets here prefaced; for
although they are related to the sonnets of earlier poets whose work
must be familiar to the writer, yet they are in no sense imitations, nor
are they echoes.

"_Poetry is the natural language of strong emotion_," the Nawab said many
years ago;--and if it may be asked why, holding this view, he has chosen
such an elaborate (and, some people might add, artificial) form as the
Sonnet, we can only answer that when an emotion or conviction is
deep-seated and permanent, it becomes clarified, concentrated, and
intensified under the stern discipline of compression within the