of literature; his lectures, though not by any means brilliant, were still productive of much good; he had a most charming and gracious personality, and he wrote some pretty poems.  But his poems are not of the kind that call for intellectual analysis or for elaborate description or, indeed, for any serious discussion at all.  They are as unsuited for panegyric as they are unworthy of censure, and it is difficult to help smiling when Mr. Robertson gravely tells us that few modern poets have given utterance to a faith so comprehensive as that expressed in the Psalm of Life, or that Evangeline should confer on Longfellow the title of ‘Golden-mouthed,’ and that the style of metre adopted ’carries the ear back to times in the world’s history when grand simplicities were sung.’  Surely Mr. Robertson does not believe that there is any connection at all between Longfellow’s unrhymed dactylics and the hexameter of Greece and Rome, or that any one reading Evangeline would be reminded of Homer’s or Virgil’s line?  Where also lies the advantage of confusing popularity with poetic power?  Though the Psalm of Life be shouted from Maine to California, that would not make it true poetry.  Why call upon us to admire a bad misquotation from the Midnight Mass for the Dying Year, and why talk of Longfellow’s ‘hundreds of imitators’?  Longfellow has no imitators, for of echoes themselves there are no echoes and it is only style that makes a school.

Now and then, however, Mr. Robertson considers it necessary to assume a critical attitude.  He tells us, for instance, that whether or not Longfellow was a genius of the first order, it must be admitted that he loved social pleasures and was a good eater and judge of wines, admiring ‘Bass’s ale’ more than anything else he had seen in England!  The remarks on Excelsior are even still more amazing.  Excelsior, says Mr. Robertson, is not a ballad because a ballad deals either with real or with supernatural people, and the hero of the poem cannot be brought under either category.  For, ’were he of human flesh, his madcap notion of scaling a mountain with the purpose of getting to the sky would be simply drivelling lunacy,’ to say nothing of the fact that the peak in question is much frequented by tourists, while, on the other hand, ’it would be absurd to suppose him a spirit . . . for no spirit would be so silly as climb a snowy mountain for nothing’!  It is really painful to have to read such preposterous nonsense, and if Mr. Walter Scott imagines that work of this kind is ‘original and valuable’ he has much to learn.  Nor are Mr. Robertson’s criticisms upon other poets at all more felicitous.  The casual allusion to Herrick’s ‘confectioneries of verse’ is, of course, quite explicable, coming as it does from an editor who excluded Herrick from an anthology of the child-poems of our literature in favour of Mr. Ashby-Sterry and Mr. William Sharp, but when Mr. Robertson tells us that Poe’s ’loftiest flights of imagination in verse . . . rise into no