"Pompey" is a good play, that is, it is good to read; I do not know whether it has been acted. It has one characteristic of Mr. Masefield's other work, a direct incisive speech, poetry of the naked fact, the brief metaphor which might come out in any man's talk and which has the "unliterary" flavor of reality--a cunningly literary mode of writing. Mr. Masefield makes Pompey say: "Five minutes ago I had Rome's future in my hand. She was wax to my seal. I was going to free her. Now is the time to free her. You can tear the scales and the chains from her." Did the Romans talk in this clipped hurried fashion? Probably they did when they were excited, for it is human to talk in short sentences; even Germans do it. The business of the dramatist is to make you believe, with an arrested compelled attention, in the speech and action of persons in clearly defined circumstances. It makes no great difference whether the scene is in a Norwegian house or on the necromantic island of Shakespeare's "Tempest." Sometimes it seems a more wonderful achievement to make the Norwegian house interesting because it is so terribly like the one we live in. Mr. Masefield's Nan seems to me worth ten of Mr. Masefield's Cornelias, and the peculiar style and habit of thought of Mr. Masefield seem more fitted to the modern subject. One of his metrically ingenious stanzas, with all the artifice of meter and rhyme, is nearer to life than his vivaciously realistic sentences put into the mouth of a Roman. "Back your port oars. Shove off. Give way together. Go on there. Man your halliards. Take the turns off. Stretch it along. Softly now. Stand by." Was such the dialect of Roman sea captains? Nobody knows. All that I argue is that Mr. Masefield's punching abruptness is more wonderfully real, more effective on the lips of modern people whom we do know. O God, O God, what pretty ways she had. He's kissing all her skin, so soft and white. She's kissing back. I think I'm going mad. Like rutting rattens in the apple loft. She held that light she carried high aloft Full in my eyes for him to hit me by, I had the light all dazzling in my eye.