Byron said the octosyllabic metre is the easiest to write. It is, unvaried, the most monotonous to read. Mr. Masefield, who breaks into anapæstic passages when hounds are in full cry, pulls it off all the way. It was not an easy thing to supply enough bite to descriptions of earth, tree, and sky, to invent enough novel incidents, to enable us to follow without fatigue a ten or fourteen miles chase across country. But it has been done, and Mr. Masefield has also succeeded in intensely interesting us in the fox without (as a rule) making him any less an animal. When he finds one earth and then another stopped the reader's feelings are what they are when a hero of romance walks blind along the plank, and it is with an immense relief that, in the end, we find the fox (at the expense of another) escapes. The final description of the rested fox's nocturnal hunt and the hounds going home is admirable fresh painting. Here is the close: Then the moon came quiet and flooded full Light and beauty on clouds like wool, On a feasted fox at rest from hunting, In the beech-wood grey where the brocks were grunting. * * * * * The beech-wood grey rose dim in the night, With moonlight fallen in pools of light, The long dead leaves on the ground were rimed, A clock struck twelve and the church bells chimed. It is just the end of such a day. THE SUPERHUMAN ANTAGONISTS. By SIR WILLIAM WATSON. Hodder & Stoughton. 6_s._ net. Nobody could accuse Sir William Watson of over-colloquialism, morbid violence, or carelessness. A slight infusion of those vices might do him good. He is determined to be as lofty and orotund as Milton, as grave as Matthew Arnold, as sage as Wordsworth, if he can manage it; and the result is often a cold and carven monument of respectable but uninspired verse akin to the better of the large tombs in Westminster Abbey. On every page of his title-poem (a debate between Ormuzd and Ahriman) we find lines like Legible haply in that brow benign. Rashnu and Vayu and great Mithra, sons With the huge monster's dragon armature, Out of the pregnant and parturient dust Large hereditaments of bliss and woe, sentences, however mighty their mould, which are to modern poetry what Lord Chaplin's speeches are to modern oratory. This much, however, can be said for Sir William, that his brain is always working in spite of his lordly panoply of words outworn, and he who can penetrate his language will arrive at some sort of argument. The shorter poems are also magniloquent, and, like the longer one, barely escape commonplaceness by a certain activity of mind. But the language would not have been poorer had none of them been written. MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE. By ARTHUR WALEY. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ and 4_s._ 6_d._ net.