It will be seen that Mr. Clutton-Brock excites to controversy, as every good critic who attempts a new analysis of an author’s genius must do. Were there space, I should like to dispute many points in his essay, “The Defects of English Prose,” in which, incidentally, he accepts the current over-estimate of the prose--the excellent prose--of Mr. Hudson. The purpose of criticism, however, is to raise questions as much as to answer them, and this Mr. Clutton-Brock continually does in his thoughtful analysis of the success and failure of great writers. He is an expositor with high standards in life and literature, who worships beauty in the temple of reason. His essays, though slight in form, are rich in matter. They are fragments of a philosophy as well as comments on authors. VI HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS Henley was a master of the vainglorious phrase. He was Pistol with a style. He wrote in order to be overheard. His words were sturdy vagabonds, bawling and swaggering. “Let us be drunk,” he cried in one of his _rondeaux_, and he made his words exultant as with wine. He saw everywhere in Nature the images of the lewd population of midnight streets. For him even the moon over the sea was like some old hag out of a Villon ballade: Flaunting, tawdry and grim, From cloud to cloud along her beat, Leering her battered and inveterate leer, She signals where he prowls in the dark alone, Her horrible old man, Mumbling old oaths and warming His villainous old bones with villainous talk. Similarly, the cat breaking in upon the exquisite dawn that wakes the “little twitter-and-cheep” of the birds in a London Park becomes a picturesque and obscene figure: Behold A rakehell cat--how furtive and acold! A spent witch homing from some infamous dance-- Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade! Or, again, take the description of the East Wind in _London Voluntaries_: Out of the poisonous East, Over a continent of blight, Like a maleficent influence released From the most squalid cellarage of hell, The Wind-fiend, the abominable-- The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light-- Comes slouching, sullen and obscene, Hard on the skirts of the embittered night; And in a cloud unclean Of excremental humours, roused to strife By the operation of some ruinous change, Wherever his evil mandate run and range, Into a dire intensity of life, A craftsman at his bench, he settles down To the grim job of throttling London Town.