It is not improbable that Landor's fascinating portrayal of the brilliant Aspasia may have had some influence upon Browning's conception of Balaustion, upon the intellectual side at least. Alcibiades says that many people think her language as pure and elegant as Pericles, and Pericles says she was never seen out of temper or forgetful of what argument to urge first and most forcibly. When all is said, however, it may be that the "halo irised around" Balaustion's head was due, more than to any one else, to the influence of the memory of Mrs. Browning, of whom she is made to say with a sublime disregard of its anachronism: "I know the poetess who graved in gold, Among her glories that shall never fade, This style and title for Euripides, _The Human with his droppings of warm tears_." After such a study of Greek life as this, wherein every available incident in history, every episode in the plays of Aristophanes bearing on the subject, every contemporary allusion are all woven together with such consummate skill that the very soul and body of the time is imaged forth, the classical poems of the other great names of the century seem almost like child's play. Landor's poems on Greek subjects sound like imitations in inferior material of antiquity. Arnold's are even duller. Swinburne tells his Greek tales in an endless flow of rhythmical, musical verse, which occasionally rises into the realm of having something to say. Morris tells his at equal length in a manner suggestive of Chaucer without Chaucer's snap, but where among them all is there such a bit of stinging life as in "Pheidippedes" or "Echetlos?" [Illustration: WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR]