are lines the Anglo-Saxon race will not readily let die. In “Pereant qui Nostra,” Mr. Mayhem preserves and even increases his old facility of expression, but there is a terrible falling-off in verbal aptitude. What are we to think of “The greatest general the world has seen” applied as a poetic description to Lord Kitchener? Mr. Mayhem will excuse us if we say that the whole expression is commonplace. Commonplace thought is bad enough, though it is difficult to avoid when one tackles a great national subject, and thinks what all good patriots and men of sense think also. “Pour être poête,” as M. Yves Guyot proudly said in his receptional address to the French Academy, “Pour être poête on n’est pas forcément aliéné.” But commonplace _language_ should always be avoidable, and it is a fault which we cannot but admit we have found throughout Mr. Mayhem’s new volume. Thus in “Laura” he compares a young goat to a “tender flower,” and in “Billings” he calls some little children “the younglings of the flock.” Again, he says of the waves at Dover in a gale that they are “horses all in rank, with manes of snow,” and tells us in “Eton College” that the Thames “runs like a silver thread amid the green.” All these similes verge upon the commonplace, even when they do not touch it. However, there is very genuine feeling in the description of his old school, and we have no doubt that the bulk of Etonians will see more in the poem than outsiders can possibly do. It cannot be denied that Mr. Mayhem has a powerful source of inspiration in his strong patriotism, and the sonnets addressed to Mr. Kruger, Mr. O’Brien, Dr. Clark, and General Mercier are full of vigorous denunciation. It is the more regrettable that he has missed true poetic diction and lost his subtlety in a misapprehension of planes and values. “Vile, vile old man, and yet more vile again,” is a line that we are sure Mr. Mayhem would reconsider in his better moments: “more vile” than what? Than himself? The expression is far too vague. “Proud Prelate,” addressed to General Mercier, must be a misprint, and it is a pity it should have slipped in. What Mr. Mayhem probably meant was “Proud Cæsar” or “soldier,” or some other dissyllabic title. The word _prelate_ can properly only be applied to a bishop, a mitred abbot, or a vicar apostolic. “Babbler of Hell, importunate mad fiend, dead canker, crested worm,” are vigorous and original, but do not save the sonnet. And as to the last two lines, “Nor seek to pierce the viewless shield of years, For that you certainly could never do,” Mr. Mayhem must excuse us if we say that the order of the lines make a sheer bathos.