many cases merely to receive the impressions of a Machiavellian ingenuity.” Shelley’s _Triumph of Life_ is “a noble but vague gnomic poem, in which Petrarch’s Trionfi are summed up and sometimes excelled.” Keats’ “great odes are Titanic and Titianic.” On page 284 we are informed that for fifteen years after the close of 1800 “poetry may be said to have been stationary in England.” When we remember that within these years appeared the best of Wordsworth’s poems, the best of Coleridge’s, the best of Scott’s, the best of Crabbe’s, the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, the best of Campbell’s, the best of Moore’s, and of Southey’s--we wonder what can be meant, till we read on to find that it was “on the contrary extremely active.” But “its activity took the form of the gradual acceptance of the new romantic ideas, the slow expulsion of the old classic taste, and the multiplication of examples of what had once for all been supremely accomplished in the hollows of the Quantocks.” In other words, its activity took the form of its activity, and its activity led to its becoming stationary. Mr. Gosse is sometimes solemnly oracular, as here: “It is a sentimental error to suppose that the winds of God blow only through the green tree; it is sometimes the dry tree which is peculiarly favourable to their passage.” It is not sometimes, we submit, but always that the dry tree will be most propitious to their passage. But we like Mr. Gosse best when he is eloquent, as here: “In the chapel of Milton’s brain, entirely devoted though it was to a Biblical form of worship, there were flutes and trumpets to accompany one vast commanding organ.” No wonder poor Milton suffered, as we know he did suffer, from insomnia!