There is only one word for that last line: it is stupendous. Those gentlemen archangels preclude anything but an amazed silence. Comment is impossible beyond the simple enunciation of the fact that they belong to literature—to the literature of Southey's vision of the apotheosis of George iii.
But let us turn from the painful spectacle of such aberrations on the part of a man who has done so much better than this in every way.
Adam Lindsay Gordon was a poet of an altogether larger and broader calibre than Mr. Kipling, but the parallel between them has more than one interesting and suggestive feature. Both as a workman and as a critic of life a certain instinct preserved the Anglo-Australian from the grosser faults of the Anglo-Indian. Gordon could only use rhymed rhythms, but he knew it, and shunned, by a rigid adherence to his own special domain, such horrors as Mr. Kipling has achieved in his blank verse. The want of delicacy of music, of melodious lyric, in Gordon is indisputable, but at least he does not thrust it upon us by offensive efforts. Mr. Kipling is, as a rule, most at home when he is using a stanza to which he can mark time with his heels, and the modern 'jingle' ballad has assuredly its justification. But what justification is there for verse, the time of which the hapless versifier has had to mark on his fingers?
