cause us to think that Lord de Tabley has paid but little attention to the question of elision in English poetry. In the second of the lines above quoted elision is impossible, in the first elision is demanded. The reason why elision is sometimes demanded is that in certain lines, as in the one which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ the hiatus which occurs when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a vowel beginning the next word may be so great as to become intolerable. The reason why elision is sometimes a merely allowable beauty is that when a word ends with _w_, _r_, or _l_, to elide the liquids is to secure a kind of billowy music of a peculiarly delightful kind. Now elision is very specially demanded in a line like that which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ where the pause of the line fall upon _the_. To make the main pause of the line fall upon _the_ is extremely and painfully bad, even when the next word begins with a consonant; but when the word following _the_ begins with a vowel, the line is absolutely immetrical; it has, indeed, no more to do with English prosody than with that prosody of Japan upon which Mr. Basil Chamberlain discourses so pleasantly. On the other hand, the elision of the second syllable of the word _music_ in the other line quoted above is equally faulty in another direction. But as we said when reviewing Mr. Bridges’s treatise on Milton’s prosody, nothing is more striking than the helplessness of most recent poets when confronted with the simple question of elision. In an ‘Ode to a Star’ there is great beauty and breadth of thought and expression. Its only structural blemish, that of an opening stanza whose form is not distinctly followed, can be so easily put right that it need only be mentioned here in order to emphasize the canon that it is only in irregular odes that variation of stanza is permissible. Keats, no doubt, in one at least of his unequalled odes, does depart from the scheme of structure indicated by the opening stanza, and without any apparent metrical need for so doing. But the poem does not gain by the departure. Besides, Keats is now a classic, and has a freedom in regard to irregularities of metre which Lord de Tabley would be the last to claim for himself. Another blemish of a minor kind in the ‘Ode to a Star’ is that of rhyming “meteor” with “wheatear.”