poem at all events, that it would appear hardly worth saying were it not that there have always been found persons to maintain the contrary.  There is no reason whatever to suppose that Milton felt any keen personal grief at the death of Edward King.  There is nothing spontaneous, nothing, one might almost say, genuine in the lament.  This is indeed strictly irrelevant to the question of its artistic merit, but it must nevertheless be admitted that there is thus much justice in the censure, that the poem purports to be the expression of an intimate sorrow, of the reality of which the reader is never wholly convinced.  In so far as it lacks this ‘soul-compelling power,’ it may be said, not unfairly, to fail of its own artistic purpose.

One further question, however, inevitably presents itself when we have to consider such a work as Lycidas, a work, that is, in which art has attained the highest perfection in one particular kind.  Although the objections urged against the individual poem may be shown to miss their mark as criticisms on that poem, may they not have force as criticisms on the class?  The allegorical pastoral, though in one sense, as I have said, created by Vergil, was yet, in another, a plant of slow growth, and represents a tradition gradually evolved to meet the needs of a long line of poets.  Petrarch, Mantuan, Marot, Spenser were more than mere imitators of Vergil or of one another; they wrote in a particular form because it answered to particular requirements, and they fashioned it in the using.  Nevertheless it may be urged with undoubted force, that the requirements were not primarily of an artistic nature, being ever governed by some alien purpose, and that consequently the form which evolved itself in answer to those requirements and to fulfil that purpose, was not by nature calculated to yield the highest artistic results.  And thus, though any attempt to question the perfection of the art which Milton brought to the composition of his elegy must needs be foredoomed to failure, the question of the propriety of the form as an artistic medium remains open; and in so far as critical opinion tends to give an unfavourable answer, in so far does the form of pastoral instituted by Vergil and handed down without break from the fourteenth century to Milton’s own time stand condemned in its most perfect flower.

Few things could be less like Lycidas than the work which next claims our attention.  Unique of its kind, and, in spite of its shortcomings, possessed of no small poetic interest, William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals may be regarded at pleasure either as a pastoral epic or as a versified romance.  It resembles the prose romances in being by nature discursive, episodic and inconsequent, and like not a few it remained unfinished.  Little would be gained by giving any detailed analysis of the plot developed through the leisurely amplitude of its 10,000 lines, while any attempt to deal, however