Provencal--thus making his skilful ballades, sestinas and the less mediaeval
narratives part of a remarkably elaborate and altogether successful hoax.

And, as this masquerade of obscure Parnassians betrayed its creator,
Cabell--impelled by some fantastic reticence--sought for more subtle
makeshifts to hide the poet. The unwritten thesis, plunging abruptly into
the realm of analytical psychology, will detail the steps Cabell has taken,
as a result of early associative disappointments, to repress or at least
to disguise, the poet in himself--and it will disclose how he has failed.
It will burrow through the latest of his works and exhume his half-buried
experiments in rhyme, assonance and polyphony. This part of the paper will
examine _Jurgen_ and call attention to the distorted sonnet printed as a
prose soliloquy on page 97 of that exquisite and ironic volume. It will
pass to the subsequent _Figures of Earth_ and, after showing how the
greater gravity of this volume is accompanied by a greater profusion of
poetry _per se_ it will unravel the scheme of Cabell's fifteen essays in
what might be called contrapuntal prose. It will unscramble all the rhymes
screened in Manuel's monologue beginning on page 294, quote the metrical
innovations with rhymed vowels on page 60, tabulate the hexameters that
leap from the solidly set paragraphs and rearrange the brilliant fooling
that opens the chapter "Magic of the Image Makers." This last is in itself
so felicitous a composite of verse and criticism--a passage incredibly
overlooked by the most meticulous of Cabell's glossarians--that it deserves
a paper for itself. For here, set down prosaically as "the unfinished Rune
of the Blackbirds" are four distinct parodies--including two insidious
burlesques of Browning and Swinburne--on a theme which is familiar to us
to-day in _les mots justes_ of Mother Goose. "It is," explains Freydis,
after the thaumaturgists have finished, "an experimental incantation in
that it is a bit of unfinished magic for which the proper words have not
yet been found: but between now and a while they will be stumbled on, and