Gaget’s “Livre des grandes merveilles d’amour” (1530), in which the Venusberg is called “le mont Horsel”; and “The Leper,” a very characteristic piece in the same collection, is founded on a passage in the “Grandes Chroniques de France” (1505).  Swinburne introduced or revived in English verse a number of old French stanza forms, such as the ballade, the sestina, the rondel, which have since grown familiar in the hands of Dobson, Lang, Gosse, and others.  In the second series of “Poems and Ballads” (1878) he gave translations of ten of the ballads of that musical old blackguard

  “Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother’s name.” [66]

The range of Swinburne’s intellectual interests has been wider than that of Rossetti and Morris.  He is a classical scholar, who writes easily in Latin and Greek.  Ancient mythology and modern politics divide his attention with the romantic literatures of many times and countries.  Rossetti made but one or two essays in prose criticism, and Morris viewed the reviewer’s art with contempt.  But Swinburne has contributed freely to critical literature, an advocate of the principles of romantic art in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt had been in the first.  The manner of his criticism is not at all judicial.  His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame both in excess—­dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate.  In particular, he works the adjective “divine” so hard that it loses meaning.  Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to the cool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to be full of insight, and his judgment in matters of poetical technique almost always right.  I may close this chapter with a few sentences of his defence of retrospective literature.[67] “It is but waste of breath for the champions of the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast off the bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turn from the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or romantic, classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we live. . . .  In vain, for instance, do the first poetess of England and the first poet of America agree to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty of confronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time, its meaning, and its need. . . .  If a poem cast in the mould of classic or feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval romance, be lifeless and worthless, it is not because the subject or the form was ancient, but because the poet was inadequate. . . .  For neither epic nor romance of chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there is nothing in the past extinct . . . [Life] is omnipresent and eternal, and forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor Crusader, to dwell, as she does with equal good will, among modern appliances in London and New York.”

[1] See vol. i., chaps. iv. and vii., “The Landscape Poets” and “The Gothic Revival.”