An editor is greatly tempted to mend a word in these exquisite verses. George Herbert was maladroit in using the word ‘rest’ in two senses. ‘Peace’ is not quite so characteristic a word, but it ought to take the place of ‘rest’ in the last line of the second stanza; so then the first line of the last stanza would not have this rather distressing ambiguity. The poem is otherwise perfect beyond description. MISERY.—Page 94. George Herbert’s work is so perfectly a box where thoughts ‘compacted lie,’ that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry, to detach a line, so fine and so significant are its neighbours; nevertheless, it may be well to stop the reader at such a lovely passage as this— ‘He was a garden in a Paradise.’ THE ROSE.—Page 99. There is nothing else of Waller’s fine enough to be admitted here; and even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic in words and fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of the third-class. Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of two kinds, and the third rank is less than great. The wearied argument of _The Rose_ is the almost squalid plea of all the poets, from Ronsard to Herrick: ‘Time is short; they make the better bargain who make haste to love.’ This thrifty business and essentially cold impatience was—time out of mind—unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity. The poets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry a warning. There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is brief—and that is the charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the verse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief. L’ALLEGRO.—Page 109. The sock represents the stage, in _L’Allegro_, for comedy, and the buskin, in _Il Penseroso_, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the comic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic. The poet of _King Lear_ is named for his sweetness and his wood-notes wild. IL PENSEROSO.—Page 113. It is too late to protest against Milton’s display of weak Italian. _Pensieroso_ is, of course, what he should have written. LYCIDAS.—Page 119. Most of the allusions in _Lycidas_ need no explaining to readers of poetry. The geography is that of the western coasts from furthest north to Cornwall. Deva is the Dee; ‘the great vision’ means the apparition of the Archangel, St. Michael, at St. Michael’s Mount; Namancos and Bayona face the mount from the continental coast; Bellerus stands for Belerium, the Land’s End. Arethusa and Mincius—Sicilian and Italian streams—represent the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil. ON A PRAYER-BOOK.—Page 131.