NORSE IN ENGLISH.—Professor C. H. Herford makes a meritorious attempt to recall attention to the influence and value of the Norse Myths upon English Poetry. William Morris was most powerfully and directly influenced by the Sagas, and of Morris Professor Herford says that “no other English poet has felt so keenly the power of Norse myth; none has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its earth-shaking humour, and its heights of tragic passion and pathos, to a place in our memories, and a home in our hearts.” It will not do, however, for (let me whisper it) who reads Morris’s poetry to-day? Has he a home in our hearts? Are his Norse enthusiasms really anything to us? I am not defending our generation for neglecting Morris, or for being indifferent to the Norse theogony, of which he was a prophet. Our age is one of prose, and the passion of prose is justice—reasonable and regulated justice. Terrible beauty, earth-shaking humour, tragic passion, and so on—the stuff of epic poetry—are relegated nowadays to the police court. Moreover, the Norse mythology is not only “pagan” in the sense of being non-Christian, it is pagan in the sense of being sub- as much as pre-Christian, differing in this respect from the Indian mythology of the _Mahabharata_, or the Egyptian mythology of the _Book of the Dead_. We can never return to it without committing an act of regression, since it is a paganism of a world inferior rather than superior to the “Christian” world. At the same time, since we must carry all our sheaves with us in order to enjoy the complete harvest of the human soul, it is necessary not to drop from consciousness the heroic past, albeit a past to which we may not return. Let it be enshrined and enjoyed in poetry and music now that it is no longer possible in life. THE COMEDY OF IT.—Comedy still remains a secret hid from the English mind, and not all the efforts of Mr. John Francis Hope to bring it into popularity will succeed where the prior efforts of Meredith have failed. The reason, as Mr. Hope has often explained it, even more clearly than Meredith, is not only that the spirit of Comedy demands “a society of cultivated men and women, wherein ideas are current and perceptions quick”—a condition certainly not now existing—but the absence of three qualities, each of which, unfortunately, blooms luxuriantly among us—“sentimentalism, puritanism, and bacchanalianism.” Comedy, the play of the mind about real ideas, is quite incompatible with any one of these three vices. If you sentimentalise, play is over, and equally it is over if you are shocked, or if you carry the _suggested_ humour of the situation too far. But one of these things the ordinary English man or woman is almost bound to do; and thus it comes about that “play,” the sparkle of common sense, is so rare among us.