and Ballads he reaches his zenith in pure style and execution. But 'In the Bay' has forty verses instead of the quite sufficient twenty. His want of mastery over style, in Schiller's sense of the knowledge not of what to write but of what to omit, is simply dreadful. He seems to think that he will achieve immortality as, we are told on such excellent authority, the heathen thought to achieve a divine hearing, by much speaking. What a fundamental ignoring (for in his case it cannot quite be called ignorance) of the Art to which his life has been devoted! The world is full of experience, and very weary, and the sole vice for which it has no tolerance is the vice of tiresomeness. This is its one condemnation. Be tiresome, and your chance of survival is as the writer of a song, a snatch, a line. For tiresomeness is the everyday word for the factitious and the untrue, and neither perverted skill nor bungling shall endure.
It is, then, just this particular epithet, tiresome, that has to be applied to so much of Mr. Swinburne's work. Take a poem like 'Anactoria'; the alleged evolution of which he has himself been at pains to point out in his Notes on Poems and Ballads. In reality this evolution is quite fanciful. The whole poem is one long, sterile insistence. The most remarkable fact about it is that a man of real power
