So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of these two plays, published at the age of twenty-three. _Fair Rosamond_, though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows some anticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physical sensation which was to be so evident in the _Poems and Ballads_, is altogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way, than the longer and more regular drama of _The Queen-Mother_. Swinburne speaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that there is in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of such better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive' which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic, reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly possible to make the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches of the play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things,' and the one beginning 'I would fain see rain,' are indeed more splendid in execution than significant as drama, but they have their dramatic significance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is there not also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in such lines as these? I should be mad, I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God, Whose thunder is confusion of the hills, And with wrath sown abolishes the fields, I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us, Make witness of it even this night that is The last for many cradles, and the grave Of many reverend seats; even at this turn, This edge of season, this keen joint of time, Finish and spare not. The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid, less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in reference to the verse of _Atalanta in Calydon_). He is ready to be harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holds out against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop when he has said the essential thing.