may make the comparison for himself, and decide for himself whether the old or the new is better.  Again, in the final fight and massacre in the hall of Atli, I cannot but prefer the Slaying of the Wooers, at the close of the “Odyssey,” or the last fight of Roland at Roncesvaux, or the prose version of the “Volsunga.”  All these are the work of men who were war-smiths as well as song-smiths.  Here is a passage from the “murder grim and great":—­

“So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his war-flame reared on high, But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel Behind the steadfast Gunnar:  but lo, have ye seen the corn, While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborne When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black, And the smitten wood-side roareth ’neath the driving thunder-wrack?  So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli’s feast, There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his edges stopped; He smote and the dead were thrust from him; a hand with its shield he lopped; There met him Atli’s marshal, and his arm at the shoulder he shred; Three swords were upreared against him of the best of the kin of the dead; And he struck off a head to the rightward, and his sword through a throat he thrust, But the third stroke fell on his helm-crest, and he stooped to the ruddy dust, And uprose as the ancient Giant, and both his hands were wet:  Red then was the world to his eyen, as his hand to the labour he set; Swords shook and fell in his pathway, huge bodies leapt and fell; Harsh grided shield and war-helm like the tempest-smitten bell, And the war-cries ran together, and no man his brother knew, And the dead men loaded the living, as he went the war-wood through; And man ’gainst man was huddled, till no sword rose to smite, And clear stood the glorious Hogni in an island of the fight, And there ran a river of death ’twixt the Niblung and his foes, And therefrom the terror of men and the wrath of the Gods arose.”

I admit that this does not affect me as does the figure of Odysseus raining his darts of doom, or the courtesy of Roland when the blinded Oliver smites him by mischance, and, indeed, the Keeping of the Stair by Umslopogaas appeals to me more vigorously as a strenuous picture of war.  To be just to Mr. Morris, let us give his rendering of part of the Slaying of the Wooers, from his translation of the “Odyssey":—­

“And e’en as the word he uttered, he drew his keen sword out Brazen, on each side shearing, and with a fearful shout Rushed on him; but Odysseus that very while let fly And smote him with the arrow in the breast, the pap hard by, And drove the swift shaft to the liver, and adown to the ground fell the sword From out of his hand, and doubled he hung above the board,