discrimination, a little more delicacy of perception.  Sincerity of utterance is valuable in a critic, but sanity of judgment is more valuable still, and Mr. Noel’s judgments are not always distinguished by their sobriety.  Many of the essays, however, are well worth reading.  The best is certainly that on The Poetic Interpretation of Nature, in which Mr. Noel claims that what is called by Mr. Ruskin the ’pathetic fallacy of literature’ is in reality a vital emotional truth; but the essays on Hugo and Mr. Browning are good also; the little paper entitled Rambles by the Cornish Seas is a real marvel of delightful description, and the monograph on Chatterton has a good deal of merit, though we must protest very strongly against Mr. Noel’s idea that Chatterton must be modernised before he can be appreciated.  Mr. Noel has absolutely no right whatsoever to alter Chatterton’s’ yonge damoyselles’ and ‘anlace fell’ into ‘youthful damsels’ and ‘weapon fell,’ for Chatterton’s archaisms were an essential part of his inspiration and his method.  Mr. Noel in one of his essays speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to sense in poetry and, no doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do; but he himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton’s music.  In the modernised version he gives of the wonderful Songe to AElla, he mars by his corrections the poem’s metrical beauty, ruins the rhymes and robs the music of its echo.  Nineteenth-century restorations have done quite enough harm to English architecture without English poetry being treated in the same manner, and we hope that when Mr. Noel writes again about Chatterton he will quote from the poet’s verse, not from a publisher’s version.

This, however, is not by any means the chief blot on Mr. Noel’s book.  The fault of his book is that it tells us far more about his own personal feelings than it does about the qualities of the various works of art that are criticised.  It is in fact a diary of the emotions suggested by literature, rather than any real addition to literary criticism, and we fancy that many of the poets about whom he writes so eloquently would be not a little surprised at the qualities he finds in their work.  Byron, for instance, who spoke with such contempt of what he called ’twaddling about trees and babbling o’ green fields’; Byron who cried, ’Away with this cant about nature!  A good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America,’ is claimed by Mr. Noel as a true nature-worshipper and Pantheist along with Wordsworth and Shelley; and we wonder what Keats would have thought of a critic who gravely suggests that Endymion is ’a parable of the development of the individual soul.’  There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem.  One is to misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities that it does not possess.  The latter is Mr. Noel’s method, and in his anxiety to glorify the artist he often does so at the expense of the work of art.