Mr. Swinburne has, indeed, the defects of his qualities. He is an ardent friend and an unflinching adversary, but we have seen that in prose no less than in poetry, in polemics as in politics, his style is liable to become overheated and thunderous. He has no patience with mediocrity in art; he disdains the _via media_ in thought and action. In these respects he stands alone among the Victorian poets, most of whom anticipate with misgivings the evaporation of faith in the supernatural, while they acknowledge that for themselves such faith has little meaning, and are inclined to melancholy musing over the 'doubtful doom of human kind' which haunted the imagination of Tennyson. And his attitude is still further apart from the intellectual tendencies discernible at the present moment in pure literature, which is now less concerned, we think, with these questions than when Mr. Arnold wrote _Literature and Dogma_, and seems more disposed to leave theology in the hands of the physical scientists and the professional metaphysicians. However this may be, it is to be seriously regretted that Mr. Swinburne's peremptory, unscrupulous manner of dealing with religious forms and beliefs which the world, perhaps, would not unwillingly let die, though by painless extinction rather than by violence, has alienated reverent minds from him, and has tarnished the brilliancy of his strenuous verse. The sensuous frenzy of his juvenile poems is still remembered against him; it betrayed a lack of moral dignity, of what the Greek poets, whom he so much admired, meant by the word [Greek: aidos]. But we very willingly acknowledge that of these excesses hardly a trace is to be found in the very numerous pieces that fill the later volumes of his collected poetry.