be allowed to degenerate into mere rhetoric or mere eloquence.  It is, in one sense, the most self-conscious of all the arts, as it is never a means to an end but always an end in itself.  Sir Edwin Arnold has a very picturesque or, perhaps we should say, a very pictorial style.  He knows India better than any living Englishman knows it, and Hindoostanee better than any English writer should know it.  If his descriptions lack distinction, they have at least the merit of being true, and when he does not interlard his pages with an interminable and intolerable series of foreign words he is pleasant enough.  But he is not a poet.  He is simply a poetical writer—­that is all.

However, poetical writers have their uses, and there is a good deal in Sir Edwin Arnold’s last volume that will repay perusal.  The scene of the story is placed in a mosque attached to the monument of the Taj-Mahal, and a group composed of a learned Mirza, two singing girls with their attendant, and an Englishman, is supposed to pass the night there reading the chapter of Sa’di upon ‘Love,’ and conversing upon that theme with accompaniments of music and dancing.  The Englishman is, of course, Sir Edwin Arnold himself: 

         lover of India,
   Too much her lover! for his heart lived there
   How far soever wandered thence his feet.

Lady Dufferin appears as

Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen’s Vice-queen!

which is really one of the most dreadful blank-verse lines that we have come across for some time past.  M. Renan is ‘a priest of Frangestan,’ who writes in ‘glittering French’; Lord Tennyson is

One we honour for his songs—­
Greater than Sa’di’s self—­

and the Darwinians appear as the ‘Mollahs of the West,’ who

hold Adam’s sons
Sprung of the sea-slug.

All this is excellent fooling in its way, a kind of play-acting in literature; but the best parts of the book are the descriptions of the Taj itself, which are extremely elaborate, and the various translations from Sa’di with which the volume is interspersed.  The great monument Shah Jahan built for Arjamand is

Instinct with loveliness—­not masonry! 
Not architecture! as all others are,
But the proud passion of an Emperor’s love
Wrought into living stone, which gleams and soars
With body of beauty shrining soul and thought,
Insomuch that it haps as when some face
Divinely fair unveils before our eyes—­
Some woman beautiful unspeakably—­
And the blood quickens, and the spirit leaps,
And will to worship bends the half-yielded knees,
Which breath forgets to breathe:  so is the Taj;
You see it with the heart, before the eyes
Have scope to gaze.  All white! snow white! cloud white!

We cannot say much in praise of the sixth line: 

   Insomuch that it haps as when some face: 

it is curiously awkward and unmusical.  But this passage from Sa’di is remarkable: