The famous "Poems and Ballads" have become so well known that people can
hardly understand the noise they made. I don't wonder at the scandal,
even now. I don't see the fun of several of the pieces, except the
mischievous fun of shocking your audience. However, "The Leper" and his
company are chiefly boyish, in the least favourable sense of the word.
They do not destroy the imperishable merit of the "Hymn to Proserpine"
and the "Garden of Proserpine" and the "Triumph of Time" and "Itylus."

Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one's old opinion, that
English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, and
sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very young,
remains an opinion unshaken. Twenty years ago, then, he had enabled the
world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true poet; he was
learned too in literature as few poets have been since Milton, and, like
Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of the ancient world and
in modern tongues. His French songs and Greek elegiacs are of great
excellence; probably no scholar who was not also a poet could match his
Greek lines on Landor.

What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poet of a rank even higher
than that which he occupies? Who can tell? There is no science that can
master this chemistry of the brain. He is too copious. "Bothwell" is
long enough for six plays, and "Tristram of Lyonesse" is prolix beyond
even mediaeval narrative. He is too pertinacious; children are the joy
of the world and Victor Hugo is a great poet; but Mr. Swinburne almost
makes us excuse Herod and Napoleon III. by his endless odes to Hugo, and
rondels to small boys and girls. _Ne quid nimis_, that is the golden
rule which he constantly spurns, being too luxuriant, too emphatic, and
as fond of repeating himself as Professor Freeman. Such are the defects