Macaulay was not by habit or any deep artistic intention a poet at all, and the _Lays_ are little more than spirited footnotes to his history, a point aptly made by Professor Hugh Walker in his scholarly study of Victorian literature, but as such they are the work of a very vivid talent and have a secure if humble place among the memorable poetry of their age. There is no work of the time exactly comparable to Macaulay’s unless it be that of William Edmondstoune Aytoun, but the _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, far from being without merit though they are, have no special characteristics that call for mention here. All the greater poets of the age tried their hand at some time or another at objective narrative verse, but Morris alone among them made narrative a chief concern of his art. _The Life and Death of Jason_, _The Earthly Paradise_ and _Sigurd the Volsung_,[17] together make up a body of narrative poetry by virtue of which it would be difficult to call Morris in this kind the inferior of any one but Chaucer. Morris had not Chaucer’s sense of character, nor his humour, nor, perhaps, the variety of his invention, but in pure narrative gift, the art of keeping the reader’s attention fixed upon the progress of a long story, it is doubtful whether he is to be placed even below Chaucer himself. It is, however, when we call to mind that quality in Chaucer which, I have suggested, gives his art something of the comprehensiveness that is supremely achieved in _King Lear_, that we feel Morris, great poet though he was, to have been definitely the less considerable man of the two. Morris loved the world of his invention, and loved it passionately, but his narrative poetry is not quite authoritatively marked by his own spiritual agonies and exultations. In speaking of so noble a poet, and one so rich in pleasure-giving, one would say nothing that should savour at any distance of disparagement. Nor is Morris to be belittled because Chaucer was his master, not only by example, but by achievement. At the same time, in Morris’s narrative poetry, however splendidly it may compel every other honour, there is to those who love it a perplexing something which leaves it short of the very highest. In a strange and impalpable way it seems as though he had withheld some last heart-beat from its creation. His claim, frequently made, that the writing of poetry was easy is not without some symbolic significance. It may have been that Morris was too happy a man to be quite among the very greatest poets. His verse stories leave us with a feeling that he is not utterly exhausted after the act of creation, that the figures of his invention, tender and virile though they are, remain outside the inner secrecies of his own emotion. There is, in fact, a larger preponderance of exclusively objective intention in his work than in Chaucer’s, and by so much he means the less in the final poetic reckoning. This is not to forget that, by