Twenty years after the publication of _Ionica_, and when that little book had become famous among the elect, the author printed at Cambridge a second part, without a title-page, and without punctuation, one of the most eccentric looking pamphlets I ever saw. The enthusiastic amateur will probably regard his collection incomplete without _Ionica II_., but he must be prepared for a disappointment. There is a touch of the old skill here and there, as in such stanzas as this: _With half a moon, and clouds rose-pink, And water-lilies just in bud, With iris on the river-brink, And white weed-garlands on the mud, And roses thin and pale as dreams, And happy cygnets born in May, No wonder if our country seems Drest out for Freedom's natal day_. Or these: _Peace lit upon a fluttering vein, And self-forgetting on the brain; On rifts by passion wrought again Splashed from the sky of childhood rain, And rid of afterthought were we And from foreboding sweetly free. Now falls the apple, bleeds the vine, And, moved by some autumnal sign, I who in spring was glad repine And ache without my anodyne; Oh! things that were! Oh! things that are! Oh! setting of my double star!_ But these are rare, and the old unique _Ionica_ of thirty years earlier is not repeated. THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT. _An Arabian Entertainment. By George Meredith. Chapman and Hall_. 1856. It is nearly forty years since I first heard of _The Shaving of Shagpat_. I was newly come, in all my callow ardour, into the covenant of Art and Letters, and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a new world. In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should concern, that _The Shaving of Shagpat_ was a book which Shakespeare might have been glad to write. I now understand that in the warm Rossetti-language this did not mean that there was anything specially reminiscent of the Bard of Avon in this book, but simply that it was a monstrous fine production, and worthy of all attention. But at the time I expected, from such a title, something in the way of a belated _Midsummer Night's Dream_ or _Love's Labour's Lost_. I was fully persuaded that it must be a comedy, and as the book even then was rare, and as I was long pursuing the loan of it, I got this dramatic notion upon my mind, and to this day do still clumsily connect it with the idea of Shakespeare. But in truth _The Shaving of Shagpat_ has no other analogy with those plays, which Bacon would have written if he had been so plaguily occupied, than that it is excellent in quality and of the finest literary flavour.