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:—

“The period of wonder in English poetry may perhaps be said to have ended with Milton.  For Milton, although born only twenty-three years before the first of the great poets of acceptance, Dryden, belongs properly to the period of romantic poetry.  He has no relation whatever to the poetry of Augustanism which followed Dryden, and which Dryden received partly from France and partly from certain contemporaries of the great romantic dramatists themselves, headed by Ben Jonson.  From the moment when Augustanism really began—in the latter decades of the seventeenth century—the periwig poetry of Dryden and Pope crushed out all the natural singing of the true poets.  All the periwig poets became too ‘polite’ to be natural.  As acceptance is, of course, the parent of Augustanism or gentility, the most genteel character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, to whom everything is vulgar that contradicts the symmetry of the pyramid of Cathay.”

One of the things I purpose to show in this book is that the most powerful expression of the Renascence of Wonder is not in Rossetti’s poems, nor yet in his pictures, nor is it in ‘Aylwin,’ but in ‘The Coming of Love.’  But in order fully to understand Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work it is necessary to know something of his life-history, and thanks to the aid I have received from certain of his friends, and also to a little topographical work, the ‘History of St. Ives,’ by Mr. Herbert E. Norris, F.E.S., I shall be able to give glimpses of his early life long before he was known in London.