It is as solemn and fantastic at the close as at this dark and splendid opening, and throughout, past description, Elizabethan. This single poem must bind Campion to that period without question; and as he lived thirty-six years in the actual reign of Elizabeth, and printed his _Book of Airs_ with Rosseter two years before her death, it is by no violence that we give him the name that covers our earlier poets of the great age. _When thou must Home_ is of the day of Marlowe. It has the qualities of great poetry, and especially the quality of keeping its simplicity; and it has a quality of great simplicity not at all child-like, but adult, large, gay, credulous, tragic, sombre, and amorous. THE FUNERAL.—Page 56. Donne, too, is a poet of fine onsets. It was with some hesitation that I admitted a poem having the middle stanza of this Funeral; but the earlier lines of the last are fine. CHARIS’ TRIUMPH.—Page 58. The freshest of Ben Jonson’s lyrics have been chosen. Obviously it is freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, his emphatic initiative, and his overhearing and impulsive voice in verse. There is a stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless it is to the credit of his honesty that he did not adopt the country-phrases in vogue; but when he takes landscape as a task the effect is ill enough. I have already had the temerity to find fault, for a blunder of meaning, with the passage of a most famous lyric, where it says the contrary of what it would say— ‘But might I of Jove’s nectar sup I would not change for thine;’ and for doing so have encountered the anger rather than the argument of those who cannot admire a pretty lyric but they must hold reason itself to be in error rather than allow that a line of it has chanced to get turned in the rhyming. IN EARTH.—Page 64. ‘I never saw anything,’ says Charles Lamb, ‘like this funeral dirge, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the _Tempest_. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intentness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.’ SONG.—Page 65.