animated hills and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams
of old mythology." No more delightful task could be the lifework of a
poet who loved his own land; but it could hardly be done again, nor, I
dare say, ever be done again so well.

To describe, however, the windings and circumfluences of rivers, the
embraces of mountain and rain-cloud in language on the other side
of amorousness may easily be inconvenient or ridiculous, and not
impossibly both; but I shouldn't at all mind upholding in public
disputation, say, at the Poetry Bookshop, that there was no other way
than Drayton's of doing the thing at all. It was the mythopoetic way.
For purposes of poetry, Britain is an unwieldy subject, and if you are
to allow to a river no other characters than those of mud and ooze,
swiftness or slowness, why, you will relate of it little but its rise,
length and fall. Drayton's weakness is that he can conceive of no
other relation than a sex-relation, and in so describing the relations
of every river in England, he very naturally becomes tedious. Satiety
is the bane of the amorist, and of worse than he. Casanova had that
in front of him when he set out to be immoral, _on ne peut plus_, in
seven volumes octavo. There simply were not enough vices to go round.
He ended, therefore, by being a dull as well as a dirty dog. "Take
back your bonny Mrs. Behn," said Walter Scott's great-aunt to him
after a short inspection, "and if you will take my advice, put her
in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first
novel." The nemesis of the pornographer: he can't avoid boring you to
tears.