The Satires are, of course, out of reach for their inordinate length. The celebrated Satire on Holland certainly makes the utmost of the fun to be easily found in the physical facts of the country whose people ‘with mad labour fished the land to shore.’ The Satire on ‘Flecno’ makes the utmost of another joke we know of—that of famine. Flecno, it will be remembered, was a poet, and poor; but the joke of his bad verses was hardly needed, so fine does Marvell find that of his hunger. Perhaps there is no age of English satire that does not give forth the sound of that laughter unknown to savages—that craven laughter. THE PICTURE OF T. C. IN A PROSPECT OF FLOWERS.—Page 173. The presence of a furtive irony of the sweetest kind is the sure sign of the visit of that unlooked-for muse. With all spirit and subtlety does Marvell pretend to offer the little girl T. C. (the future ‘virtuous enemy of man’) the prophetic homage of the habitual poets. The poem closes with an impassioned tenderness not to be found elsewhere in Marvell. THE DEFINITION OF LOVE.—Page 179. The noble phrase of the _Horatian Ode_ is not recovered again, high or low, throughout Marvell’s book, if we except one single splendid and surpassing passage from _The Definition of Love_— ‘Magnanimous despair alone Could show me so divine a thing.’ CHILDHOOD.—Page 183. One of our true poets, and the first who looked at nature with the full spiritual intellect, Henry Vaughan was known to few but students until Mr. E. K. Chambers gave us his excellent edition. The tender wit and grave play of Herbert, Crashaw’s lovely rapture, are all unlike this meditation of a soul condemned and banished into life. Vaughan’s imagination suddenly opens a new window towards the east. The age seems to change with him, and it is one of the most incredible of all facts that there should be more than a century—and such a century!—from him to Wordsworth. The passing of time between them is strange enough, but the passing of Pope, Prior, and Gray—of the world, the world, whether reasonable or flippant or rhetorical—is more strange. Vaughan’s phrase and diction seem to carry the light. _Il vous semble que cette femme dégage de la lumière en marchant_? _Vous l’aimez_! says Marius in _Les Misérables_ (I quote from memory), and it seems to be by a sense of light that we know the muse we are to love. SCOTTISH BALLADS.—Page 191.