Further on we find that

  “England’s trident-sceptre roams
  Her territorial seas,”

merely because the unfortunate sceptre has to rhyme somehow to “English homes.”

But I have a further complaint against Mr. HENLEY.  He presumes, in the most fantastic manner, to alter the well-known titles of celebrated poems. “The Isles of Greece” is made to masquerade as “The Glory that was Greece”; “Auld Lang Syne” becomes “The Goal of Life,” and “Tom Bowline” is converted into “The Perfect Sailor.”  This surely (again I use the words of Mr. HENLEY) “is a thing preposterous, and distraught.”  On the whole, I cannot think that Mr. HENLEY has done his part well.  His manner is bad.  His selection, it seems to me, is open to grave censure, on broader grounds than the mere personally equational of which he speaks, and his choppings, and sub-titles, and so forth, are not commendable.  The irony of literary history has apparently ordained that Mr. HENLEY should first patronise, and then “cut,” both CAMPBELL and MACAULAY.  Was the shade of MACAULAY disturbed when he learnt that Mr. HENLEY considered his “Battle of Naseby” both “vicious and ugly”?

BARON DE BOOK-WORMS & CO.

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