in “Beowulf.”  Their herding and agriculture are described, their implements and costumes, feasts in hall, songs, rites of worship, public meetings, and finally their warfare when they go forth against the invading Romans.  In “The Roots of the Mountains” the tribe of the Wolf has been driven into the woods and mountains by the vanguard of the Hunnish migrations.  In time they make head against these, drive them back, and retake their fertile valley.  In each case there is a love story and, as in Scott, the private fortunes of the hero and heroine are enwoven with the ongoings of public events.  But it is the general life of the tribe that is of importance, and there is little individual characterisation.  There is a class of thralls in “The House of the Wolfings,” but no single member of the class is particularised, like Garth, the thrall of Cedric, in “Ivanhoe.”

The later numbers of the series have no semblance of actuality.  The last of all, indeed, “The Sundering Flood,” is a war story which attains an air of geographical precision by means of a map—­like the plan of Egdon Heath in “The Return of the Native”—­but the region and its inhabitants are alike fabulous.  Romances such as “The Water of the Wondrous Isles” and “The Wood beyond the World” (the names are not the least imaginative feature of these curious books) are simply a new kind of fairy tales.  Unsubstantial as Duessa or Armida or Circe or Morgan le Fay are the witch-queen of the Wood beyond the World and the sorceress of the enchanted Isle of Increase Unsought.  The white Castle of the Quest, with its three champions and their ladies, Aurea, Atra, and Viridis; the yellow dwarfs, the magic boat, the wicked Red Knight, and his den, the Red Hold; the rings and spells and charms and garments of invisibility are like the wilder parts of Malory or the Arabian Nights.

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an early adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite school, although such of his work as is specifically Gothic is to be found mainly in the first series of “Poems and Ballads” (1866);[57] a volume which corresponds to Morris’ first fruits, “The Defence of Guenevere.”  If Morris is prevailingly a Goth—­a heathen Norseman or Saxon—­Swinburne is, upon the whole, a Greek pagan.  Rossetti and Morris inherit from Keats, but Swinburne much more from Shelley, whom he resembles in his Hellenic spirit; as well as in his lyric fervour, his shrill radicalism—­political and religious—­and his unchastened imagination.  Probably the cunningest of English metrical artists, his art is more closely affiliated with music than with painting.  Not that there is any paucity of imagery in his poetry; the imagery is superabundant, crowded, but it is blurred by an iridescent spray of melodious verbiage.  The confusion of mind which his work often produces does not arise from romantic vagueness, from the dreamlike and mysterious impression left by a ballad of Coleridge’s or a story of Tieck’s, but rather, as in Shelley’s case, from the dizzy splendour and excitement of the diction.  His verse, like Shelley’s, is full of foam and flame, and the result upon the reader is to bewilder and exhaust.  He does not describe in pictures, like Rossetti and Morris, but by metaphors, comparisons, and hyperboles.  Take the following very typical passage—­the portrait of Iseult in “Tristram of Lyonesse” (1882);