comparison with any narrative poet other than Chaucer, Morris’s work is flooded with subjective passion, far beyond that of Macaulay or of Scott himself. In the earlier part of this study I have suggested that Morris really lived in the world of his stories more actually than in the nineteenth century, and that is, I think, the truth. But his capacity for imaginative life at all, immense though it was, had always just a strain of decorative facility that marked it a little apart from the constant imaginative pressure that we find in Chaucer. Morris told us magnificent stories, very moving and quick with heroic life, and to read them is to pass into a world of living and significant romance. But, remembering our own mortality, he has not the touch of revelation that was so easily Chaucer’s, not quite the same breath of apocalyptic love. The narrative work of the other great Victorian poets hardly calls for special consideration, being incidental to and of a part with their normal practice, not the result, as with Morris, of a specific artistic plan. But at this point a word may be said of the many dramas that were written during the age, in which we should expect from the nature of this form something of that unification which has been referred to in what has been said about Chaucer and _King Lear_. The Victorian poets as playwrights, and they nearly all tried their hands at the craft, suffered from the radical disability of having no living theatre in which to learn their craft and in which to see their invention come to full embodiment. This is not the place to discuss the reasons why it came about, but the fact remains that when Tennyson began to write the English theatre had long since driven out the spirit of poetry, and continued to enforce the exile during the whole of his long life. The waste of energy incurred by Tennyson and Browning and Morris and Swinburne and Arnold, not to name a number of less celebrated men, in the writing of plays (of the succession of poets preceding them the same thing could be said) is one of the tragic futilities both of English literature and of the English theatre. It was a time when the actor had achieved complete ascendency in the theatre and when what he wanted was, not creative poets whose works he could perform, but hack playwrights who could serve the purpose of his own histrionic virtuosity. No more of this need be said here, but the list of Victorian plays written by men of great poetic gifts is a pathetic witness of the indomitable aspirations of the English genius towards drama and of the shameless indifference through long periods of the theatre towards those aspirations. What these men might have done in a fortunate theatre cannot be said, but in view of the very imperfect evidence available it would be quite unsafe to say of any one of them that he had not the gifts that would have served a great theatre greatly. In the event, their dramas were, for the most part, little