Like the thieves of the sea he would track us,
And shatter our ships on the main ;

But we had bold Neptune to back us,·
And where are the galleons of Spain?

His caracks were christened of dames

To the kirtles whereof he would tack us;
With his saints and his gilded stern-frames,
He had thought like an egg-shell to crack us i
Now Howard may get to his Flaccus,

And Drake to his Devon again,

And Hawkins bowl rubbers to Bacchus,-
For where are the galleons of Spain?

Let his Majesty hang to St. James
The ax that he whetted to hack us;
He must play at some lustier games
Or at sea he can hope to out-thwack us;
To his mines of Peru he would pack us
To tug at his bullet and chain;

Alas! that his Greatness should lack us! —
But where are the galleons of Spain?

Envoy

GLORIANA !-the Don may attack us
Whenever his stomach be fain;

He must reach us before he can rack us,
And where are the galleons of Spain?

"Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid and works its effect, itself unseen," so Sir Joshua Reynolds asserted, paraphrasing Horace. And in another of his suggestive discourses the English painter amplified the same thought in a passage which is as applicable to poetry as it is to painting: "The great end of the art is to strike the imagination. The painter therefore is to make no ostentation of the means by which this is done; the spectator is only to feel the result in his bosom. An inferior artist is unwilling that

any part of his industry should be lost upon the spectator. He takes as much pains to discover, as the greater artist does to conceal, the marks of his subordinate assiduity." While this is true of one class of inferior artists, there is another class who are deficient in this "subordinate assiduity," and who have not taken the trouble to master the means whereby they must strike the imagination. They are prone to assert a claim to that poetic license which can be allowed only to the greater artists and which the greater artists very rarely ask us to excuse.

In the Mexico of Montezuma, when the natives first caught sight of the cavalrymen of Cortez, they thought that horse and man were one, and they were astonished when they chanced to behold a trooper dismounting from his steed. When a poet soars aloft upon Pegasus he ought to be one with his winged steed; he may guide it at will as it soars aloft; but he must not let the spectator see him dismount.

APPENDIX

A: SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY

THE student who comes to the consideration of English versification without any previous acquaintance with its principles will do well to begin by training himself to recognize the various rhythms and meters. He should take a good collection of poetry,- Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Stedman's Victorian or American Anthologies, and go through its pages identifying the rhythm and the meter of the successive poems until he has attained certainty of decision. At the same time he can investigate the various forms of the stanza employed by the leading British and American lyrists. These anthologies contain only the more popular and more representative poems of the several authors; and the student will do well to select two or three poets and to examine their complete works to see if he can perceive in the lyrics omitted from the anthologies any technical reason for the comparative failure to please the public. Sometimes he will be able to discover that an undue length of line or an awkwardness of rhythm or a monotony of rime may be responsible for the lack of suc

cess.

Then as he becomes more familiar with the technic of versification and more responsive to its delicate effects, he may consider more highly specialized collections of poetry, each devoted to a single type: Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Cambridge Edition, Main's Treasury of English Sonnets, Gosse's English Odes, Gleeson White's Ballads and Rondeaux, Locker's Lyra Elegantiarum. Some of these volumes are devoted to poems in the same rigid form and others are confined to lyrics animated by the same spirit.

But if the student really wishes to attain an intimate understanding of the art of verse he must attempt versemaking himself. The result of his effort may be negligible, but the effort will be its own reward. He may begin very modestly by taking any simple passage of prosefor example, a newspaper account of a fire or of any other accident and rephrasing this in a succession of iambs, running on without any division into lines. Another passage may be turned into trochees, a third into anapests and a fourth into dactyls. The iambs and the trochees ought to be achieved with no great difficulty; but the succession of dactyls and of anapests will not be so easy. When a fair facility has been conquered a passage may be chosen from some public address Webster's Bunker Hill Oration or Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech to be recast into blank verse, unrimed iambic pentameter. Another passage might be taken from a novel to be turned into trochaic tetrameter, the meter of The Song of Hiawatha.

Then the student may undertake a task calling for more or less command of form. He may find a simple story either in a newspaper or excerpted from a play or a romance; and this simple story he may turn into a ballad. The kind of ballad which he decides to experiment in ought to be consonant with the character of the theme. That is to say, the story may be treated with the naïf simplicity of the old English ballads, such as Sir Patrick Spens; it may be told with the narrative leisureliness of Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride; it may have the swift terseness of Scott's Young Lochinvar, and of Macaulay's Battle of Ivry; it may glow with the dramatic intensity of Rudyard Kipling's Ballade of East and West; or it may be cast in couplets with the quaint color of Whittier's Maud Muller, or with the picturesque flavor of Austin Dobson's Ballad of Beau Brocade.

Other exercises of the same sort will easily suggest themselves to the student. For example, there would be profit in taking a critical statement from any one of Ar