Before proceeding to a more minute notice of the various poems, we would observe that a predilection is apparent throughout for antiquity and classical association; not that strong love which made Shelley, as it were, the heir of Plato; not that vital grasp of conception which enabled Keats without, and enables Landor with, the most intimate knowledge of form and detail, to return to and renew the old thoughts and beliefs of Greece; still less the mere superficial acquaintance with names and hackneyed attributes which was once poetry.  Of this conventionalism, however, we have detected two instances; the first, an allusion to “shy Dian’s horn” in “breathless glades” of the days we live, peculiarly inappropriate in a sonnet addressed “To George Cruikshank on his Picture of ’The Bottle;’” the second a grave call to Memory to bring her tablets, occurring in, and forming the burden of, a poem strictly personal, and written for a particular occasion.  But the author’s partiality is shown, exclusively of such poems as “Mycerinus” and “The Strayed Reveller,” where the subjects are taken from antiquity, rather in the framing than in the ground work, as in the titles “A Modern Sappho,” “The New Sirens,” “Stagyrus,” and “In utrumque paratus.”  It is Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles who “prop his mind;” the immortal air which the poet breathes is “Where Orpheus and where Homer are;” and he addresses “Fausta” and “Critias.”

There are four narrative poems in the volume:—­“Mycerinus,” “The Strayed Reveller,” “The Sick King in Bokhara,” and “The Forsaken Merman.”  The first of these, the only one altogether narrative in form, founded on a passage in the 2nd Book of Herodotus, is the story of the six years of life portioned to a King of Egypt succeeding a father “who had loved injustice, and lived long;” and tells how he who had “loved the good” revels out his “six drops of time.”  He takes leave of his people with bitter words, and goes out

“To the cool regions of the groves he loved........ 
Here came the king holding high feast at morn,
Rose-crowned; and ever, when the sun went down,
A hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom,
From tree to tree, all thro’ the twinkling grove,
Revealing all the tumult of the feast,
Flushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine;
While the deep-burnished foliage overhead
Splintered the silver arrows of the moon.”—­p. 7.

(a daring image, verging towards a conceit, though not absolutely such, and the only one of that character that has struck us in the volume.)

  “So six long years he revelled, night and day: 
  And, when the mirth waxed loudest, with dull sound
  Sometimes from the grove’s centre echoes came,
  To tell his wondering people of their king;
  In the still night, across the steaming flats,
  Mixed with the murmur of the moving Nile.”—­pp. 8, 9.

Here a Tennysonian influence is very perceptible, more especially in the last quotation; and traces of the same will be found in “The Forsaken Merman.”