but to suppose an Inferno by the French and the English artist. It is not caricature that declares the impression we should obtain from Henley's would be an impression of colour--lurid and searing flame: from Maupassant's, smell, fetid and obscene.

Out of the sordid and utter blank unloveliness of an Infirmary ward, Mr Henley has contrived to extract colour, fun, almost romance. When he is waiting to "storm The thick sweet mystery of chloroform, The "drunken dark, the little death-in-life," or is living on his back in the long hours of repose a “practical night"mare of life," and the "new days" pass "in endless "procession; A pageant of shadows silently, leeringly "wending On . . . and still on . . . still on," or when "dizzy, hysterical, faint" he is at last carried out from that "transformed back-kitchen" into the "beautiful "world," and "the smell of the mud blows brave "like a breath of the sea"-what a strong and constant spirit breathes in the lines, what a delightful openness of soul to every influence, every suggestion of life and of the living! In trying to select from Mr Henley's sketch-book, one is at a stand, because everything is so perfect. The "brace of boys" playing at operations, the phthisical ploughman who tells, when you "let his "melancholy wander" "pretty stories Of women that "have wooed him Long ago"; the "Visitor," "bearing

• It is only fair to say that of the sketches In Hospital I cannot pretend to speak as "one who knows": a friend who can, gives me this among other criticisms. "I like the thing, but am not very much taken with it. It "strikes one as having been written when time had blunted the keen edge of "the writer's memory. There is too little detail-one notices the little things "at such a time, for in sickness everything, both pleasure and pain, is inten"sified. For a poem there is not enough of the writer's own feelings—a sick "man is somewhat apt to be confidential. And then he doesn't seem to get

"keen on medical shop' or to talk of his ailments, or to gradually sink from "pity to somewhat callous curiosity about each new case. The descriptions "of the nurses and the scrubber, the house-surgeon, and the night after the "operation, are good." "He seems to me to have missed the

"intensity of the first few days."

"a sheaf of tracts, a bag of buns, A wee old maid that "sweeps the Bridegroom's way," and that unsurpassed festival of New Year's Eve when "Kate the scrubber" (forty summers, stout but sportive) treads a measure to the music of the "Wind that Shakes the Barley," from a penny whistle "tickled by artistic fingers": the patients, for once forgetful of mangled limbs or cruel diseases, "brisk and cheerful Are encouraging the dancer, And applauding the musician." The gas burns dimly in an atmosphere of "many ardent smokers": "full of shadow lurch the corners, and the doctor peeps "and passes." Hogarth's pencil could have drawn nothing more instinct with life: nothing, certainly, half so genial.

When Mr Henley has done with the darker hues, the harsher outlines, his appreciation of what is fresh and vivid and youthful takes us right back to Chaucer in its joyous naïveté.

Once indeed the poet gives way to a mood of despair. Life may be a brilliant game: it is not for him to play it. He is broken at last. He would barter every hope for release from imminent pain. Yet although a darkness that may be felt possesses his heart, he cannot but mark how

out in the bay a bugle

is lilting a gallant song.

The clouds are racing eastward,
The blithe wind cannot rest,
And a shard on the shingle flashes
Like the soul of a shining jest.

For the most part, Mr Henley's Echoes are "all the joy "of life." His verse has in it an elemental rapture. "Cloud-shadow and scudding sun-burst," "the look of "leaves a-twinkle with windlets clear and still," woodlands and meadows "o'erblown with sunny shadows "o'ersped with winds at play" of such stuff are his dreams made.

He has something of the spirit of the old-world poets who loved so dearly the play of sun-light on flashing armour, the swift thrust and parry of swords in green wood or tapestried chamber. He would give but little for your friendship if it is only with moderate pleasure

that

in the silver dusk you hear, Reverberated from crag and scar,

Bold bugles blowing points of war.

All that is weird, remote, with mystery fraught, has no less fascination for him than the colours of romance, the joyous freshness of Spring and youthful Love.

He hears ever a voice "calling until you cannot stay"

Out of the sound of ebb and flow,
Out of the sight of lamp and star,
It calls you where the good winds blow,
And the unchanging meadows are:
From faded hopes and hopes agleam,

It calls you, calls you night and day.
Beyond the dark into the dream

Over the hills and far away.

His soul goes out as on a quest to

The still strange land, unvexed of sun or stars,
Where Lancelot rides clanking thro' the haze.

Something might be said of his experiments with the ballade and the rondeau-not merely pretty toying with an exotic muse, pleasant jingling of vers-de-société, but, sometimes it would seem, a veritable avatar-in the Puritan's own land-of Francis Villon the old-French lover, scholar, house-breaker, poet, ardent and lifeloving as ever, but with morals considerably improved. Nor should the saga-like fury of the Song of the Sword go altogether unmentioned. It is enough, however, merely to note how a strong personality and a clear artistic vision make themselves felt almost equally everywhere in these so rich and various activities.

His Prose.

Of Mr Henley's prose it need not be said that it is vigorous, brilliant, versatile. As a critic he is as unlike Andrew Lang as he is unlike Mathew Arnold. He never plays with a subject, contriving to get infinite amusement out of it by the way, and yet leaving his readers with a clearer opinion or wider knowledge at the end. Nor does he make the merits or demerits of the reviewed a text from which to read us a homily on faults of national temper or limits of human capacity. The most salient feature of his method is the unswerving steadiness with which it keeps the end in view. A critic's function is to estimate, to weigh, to find for the thing criticised its relative place. For anything that has no direct bearing on that, Mr Henley cares nothing. In spite of its business-like air, his prose is full of good things. There is his advice to the essayist "in default of wisdom. . . to have no scruples about using whatever common sense is his": his praise of Addison's essays as proving "that 'tis possible to be eloquent without adjectives and elegant without affectation." There is his description of our attitude to literature: "M. Guy de Maupassant can write but hath a devil, and we take him not because of his writing but because of his devil; and Blank and Dash and So-and-So and the rest could no more than so many sheep develop a single symptom of possession among them, and we take them because a devil and they are incompatibles. And art is short and time is long; and we care nothing for art and almost as much for time." Perhaps Mr Henley's pedestrian muse is most delightful with "her work-a-day soul put by" when criticism is a superfluity, and sympathy everything. He is in his very best and brightest mood when he comes down from the tribunal and speaks to us frankly and pleasantly of his own feelings: of how in reading the prose version of the Odyssey he has "a breath of the clear, serene airs that blew through the antique Hellas." Or he sends us back once more,

with his eulogy brilliant almost as the very master-piece he praises, to the furnisher-forth of our childhood's whole imaginings, that haschish-made-words, as he quaintly calls it, the book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. We wonder that it is so long since we last took our pleasure in that "voluptuous farce, masque and anti-masque of wantonness and stratagem, of winecups and jewels and fine raiment, of gaudy nights and amorous days, of careless husbands and adventurous wives, of innocent fathers and rebel daughters and lovers happy or befooled. . . . . There,” he reminds us, "the night is musical with happy laughter and the sound of lutes and voices; it is seductive with the clink of goblets and the odour of perfumes: not a shadow but has its secrets, or jovial or amorous or terrible here falls a head, and there you may note the contrapuntal effect of the bastinado. But the blood is quickly hidden with flowers, the bruises are tired over with cloth-of-gold, and the jolly pageant sweeps on."

Henley the poet, Henley the dramatist,

The Man. Henley the critic, are only the varied mani

festations of a far greater force than any or all of them. I mean, of course, Henley the man. Admirable as his literary gifts are, it is the personality underlying them that calls forth most genuine and hearty enthusiasm. One feels that the most abiding and truest qualities of his work are qualities of heart rather than of intellect. There is a refreshing wholesomeness in his nature. He has looked life in the eyes, and has seen in them both the terror and the charm. He has borne his share of pleasure and pain, and he looks back on each with kindly tolerance. He knows that salutary truth-to-day so often forgotten-that to be a good artist it needs first to be a good man. And, with no smug Pharisaism but in true nobility of soul, he can never feel grateful enough for the boon of being born, first a man, and then an artist. One might say of him what has been said so