got the effort after it, and in Atalanta the effort is strenuous; but effort is not achievement, and never will be. Follow up Mr. Swinburne's dramatic work to its culmination, and what do we find? Bothwell, the apotheosis of prolixity, the most tiresome alleged 'masterpiece' of the time. How to describe it? How to give it a place? How not to admit that it is nothing but a vast piece of perverted ingenuity? a poetical Great Eastern that is only good for splitting up into match-wood? Mr. Swinburne calls it a 'drame épique,' and with this label round its neck let it float away, a gorgeous cripple, into the realm of forgetfulness.
On Chastelard and Atalanta followed the Poems and Ballads, and on the Poems and Ballads followed the Notes thereon; and the lines on which Mr. Swinburne's work was to run were laid down. The Poems and Ballads are a wonderful and extensive insistence on the over-luxuriant promise of his lyric power. There is not one truly satisfactory poem in the book. It is the production of a 'marvellous boy,' but that is all. Mr. Swinburne from the start was cursed with a fatal facility. One of his early critics, the Morning Star, congratulated him on 'writing French chansons' in Chastelard, 'of which Chastelard or Ronsard might have been proud.' Alas! Mr. Swinburne had the gift of writing a good many
