it, speaking of the current English versions as wretched misrepresentations of the original.  But in all of Shelley’s poetry the scenery, architecture, and imagery in general are sometimes Italian, sometimes Asiatic, often wholly fantastic, but never mediaeval.  Their splendour is a classic splendour, and not what Milton contemptuously calls “a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness.”  His favourite names are Greek:  Cythna, Ianthe, and the like.  The ruined cathedral in “Queen Mab”—­a poem only in its title romantic—­is coupled with the ruined dungeon, in whose courts the children play; both alike “works of faith and slavery,” symbols of the priestcraft and kingcraft which Shelley hated, now made harmless by the reign of Reason and Love in a regenerated universe.  How different is the feeling which the empty cathedral inspires in Lowell; once thronged with worshippers, now pathetically lonely—­a cliff, far inland, from which the sea of faith has forever withdrawn!  At the time when “Queen Mab” was written, Coleridge, Southey, and Landor’s “Gebir” were Shelley’s favourite reading.  “He was a lover of the wonderful and wild in literature,” says Mrs. Shelley, in her notes on the poem; “but had not fostered these tastes at their genuine sources—­the romances and chivalry of the Middle Ages—­but in the perusal of such German works as were current in those days.[4] . . .  Our earlier English poetry was almost unknown to him.”

“Queen Mab” begins with a close imitation of the opening lines of Southey’s “Thalaba the Destroyer.”  The third member of the Lake School is a standing illustration of Mr. Colvin’s contention that the distinction between classic and romantic is less in subject than in treatment.  Southey regarded himself as, equally with Wordsworth and Coleridge, an innovator and a rebel against poetic conventions.  His big Oriental epics, “Thalaba” and “The Curse of Kehama,” are written in verse purposely irregular, but so inferior in effect to the irregular verse of Coleridge and Scott as to prove that irregularity, as such, is only tolerable when controlled by the subtly varying lyric impulse—­not when it is adopted as a literary method.  Southey’s worth as a man, his indefatigable industry, his scholarship, and his excellent work in prose make him an imposing figure in our literature.  But his poetical reputation has faded more rapidly than that of his greater contemporaries.  He ranged widely in search of subjects and experimented boldly in forms of verse; but his poems are seldom inspired; they are manufactures rather than creations, and to-day Southey, the poet, represents nothing in particular.