Swinburne’s own ballads are clever and learned experiments, but he does not practise the brevity which he recommends; some of them, such as “The Bloody Son,” “The Weary Wedding,” and “The Bride’s Tragedy,” otherwise most impressive, would be more so if they were shorter or less wordy.  Though his genius is more lyrical than dramatic, the fascination which the dramatic method has had for him from the first is as evident in his ballads as in his series of verse dramas, which begins with “The Queen Mother,” and includes the enormous “Mary Stuart” trilogy.  Several of these are mediaeval in subject; the “Rosamond” of his earliest volume—­Fair Rosamond of the Woodstock Maze—­the other “Rosamund, Queen of the Goths” (1899) in which the period of the action is 573 A.D.; and “Locrine” (1888), the hero of which is that mythic king of Britain whose story had been once before dramatised for the Elizabethan stage; and whose daughter, “Sabrina fair,” goddess of the Severn, figures in “Comus.”  But these are no otherwise romantic than “Chastelard” or “The Queen Mother.”  The dramatic diction is fashioned after the Elizabethans, of whom Swinburne has been an enthusiastic student and expositor, finding an attraction even in the morbid horrors of Webster, Ford, and Tourneur.[62]

Once more the poet touched the Round-Table romances in “The Tale of Balen” (1896), written in the stanza of “The Lady of Shalott,” and in a style simpler and more direct than “Tristram of Lyonesse.”  The story is the same as Tennyson’s “Balin and Balan,” published with “Tiresias and Other Poems” in 1885, as an introduction to “Merlin and Vivien.”  Here the advantage is in every point with the younger poet.  Tennyson’s version is one of the weakest spots in the “Idylls.”  His hero is a rough Northumberland warrior who looks with admiration upon the courtly graces of Lancelot, and borrows a cognisance from Guinevere to wear upon his shield, in hope that it may help him to keep his temper.  But having once more lost control of this, he throws himself upon the ground

  “Moaning ‘My violences, my violences!’”—­

a bathetic descent not unexampled elsewhere in Tennyson.

This episode of the old “Morte Darthur” has fine tragic possibilities.  It is the tale of two brothers who meet in single combat, with visors down, and slay each other unrecognised.  It has some resemblance, therefore, to the plan of “Sohrab and Rustum,” but it cannot be said that either poet avails himself of the opportunity for a truly dramatic presentation of his theme.  Tennyson, as we have seen, aimed to give epic unity to the wandering and repetitious narrative of Malory, by selecting and arranging his material with reference to one leading conception; the effort of the king to establish a higher social state through an order of Christian knighthood, and his failure through the gradual corruption of the Round Table.  He subdues the history of Balin to this purpose, just as he does the history