Critics like to assume that the enthusiasm which breeds this kind of chivalrous poetry is dead and buried in the classics. They no more expect to see a new _Faerie Queene_ published than to hear of a new dodo inhabiting the plantations of the interior of Madagascar. But in literature it is always unsafe to say that a door is closed for ever; if we are rash enough to make such an assertion, it is sure to fly open in our faces. It was a commonplace of criticism ten years ago that the epic would never reappear in literature, and behold Mr. Doughty presents us with a _Dawn in Britain_ which is as long as the _Lusiads_ would be if _Paradise Lost_ were tacked on to the tail of it. Last week I read in a very positive volume that the Pastoral can never revisit the cold glimpses of a world that has exchanged its interest in shepherds for a solicitude about miners and chauffeurs. My instant reflection on reading that opinion was to wonder how soon a young poet would publish a fresh set of Bucolics, with the contest of Damaetas and Menalcas set forth to a new tune upon the Pans' pipes. For this reason I cannot say that I was astonished, although much interested, to find a young man--and, I venture to think, a young man of some genius--reviving the old music of the magic woodland, which had seemed to be dead, or closed, since the seventeenth century. It is a wish to make his work a little known to English readers which has led me to venture on some remarks to-day about the Romance of Fairyland. M. Albert Mockel is a Fleming, and if M. Octave Mirbeau, in a celebrated article in the Paris _Figaro_, had not called M. Maeterlinck the Belgian Shakespeare, I should have been tempted to describe M. Mockel as the Belgian Spenser. I may go so far as to call him a Belgian Ariosto. M. Mockel has not enjoyed the same popularity as his eminent countryman; perhaps he had no Octave Mirbeau to immortalize him with a gorgeous paradox. But in 1891 M. Mockel, who must then have been very youthful, published a poem, entitled _Chantefable_, which was enough to inspire great hopes of his future among not a few judicious readers. He has done nothing, in my judgment, to justify those hopes so fully as he now has in the volume he has published, called, _Contes pour les Enfants d'hier_, with ingenious illustrations by M. Auguste Donnay. These illustrations are very clever, although they would never have been drawn had it not been for Aubrey Beardsley's _Morte d'Arthur_ (1893). M. Donnay is skilful, and he emulates Beardsley's wonderful, pure line, without always perfectly attaining to it.