With regard to what we have called the realistic side of the romantic movement as distinguished from its purely poetical and supernatural side, Nature was for the Augustan temper much too ungenteel to be described realistically. Yet we must not suppose that in the eighteenth century Nature turned out men without imaginations, without the natural gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty of gazing honestly in her face. She does not work in that way. In the time of the mammoth and the cave-bear she will give birth to a great artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk. In the period before Greece was Greece, among a handful of Achaians she will give birth to the greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say, the greatest group of poets, the world has ever yet seen. In the time of Elizabeth she will give birth, among the illiterate yeomen of a diminutive country town, to a dramatist with such inconceivable insight and intellectual breadth that his generalizations cover not only the intellectual limbs of his own time, but the intellectual limbs of so complex an epoch as the twentieth century.” Rossetti had the theory, I believe, that important as humour is in prose fiction and also in worldly verse, it cannot be got into romantic poetry, as he himself understood romantic poetry; for he did not class ballads like Kinmont Willie, where there are such superb touches of humour, among the romantic ballads. And, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has somewhere remarked, his poems, like Morris’s, are entirely devoid of humour, although both the poets were humourists. But the readers of Rhona’s Letters in ‘The Coming of Love’ will admit that a delicious humour can be imported into the highest romantic poetry. With one more quotation from the essay in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ I must conclude my remarks upon the keynote of all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, whether imaginative or critical:—