sies, they are certainly not very "swift shuttles of an Empire's loom."

That any living poet could make a beautiful poem out of such harsh phrases as "torn bergedges, "hide-stripped sledges," "skeleton horses," "heat-rotted jungle hollows," and "buffalo wallows," is about as reasonable as to expect a Praxitiles to carve in Parian marble a Venus from a fishwife, or an Apollo from contemplating a chimney sweep or a rag-picker.

The following simile is certainly Kiplingesque:

"As the deer breaks-as the steer breaks-from the herd where they graze,

In the faith of little children we went on our ways."

Now, to say nothing of the fact that the "they" implies that either there is more than one steer, or that the one steer was herding with the one deer, we call your attention to the dissimilarity between the manner in which "little children went" and the dashing away of a meek-eyed timid deer, or the mad rush of an unmanageable, wild, dare-devil

steer.

Again, we have "a Power" that "troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet." Now, of course there is the "Still," the ocean, that has neither voice nor feet. But the ceasless tides of "the deep heaving sea" which Byron so consistently urged to "roll on," prove that the ocean is con

templated to a far better advantage from the poet's standpoint as deep, vast, and ever restless than as a "Still" without voice or feet.

The author of a well-known rhetoric says: "The laws of rhetoric are not Medo-Persian; but he who ventures to disregard them must possess a sound head and a cultured taste."

But the thought to which the multitudes have. a right to object, whether cultured or unlettered, is radically different from violated laws of syntax and figures of speech. In singing the loyalty to England of those states "that have stayed at thy knees, Mother," the poet says:

"One from the ends of the earth-gifts at an open doorTreason has much, but we, Mother, thy sons have more! From the whine of a dying man from the snarl of a wolf-pack freed,

Turn, for the world is thine. Mother, be proud of thy seed!"

Now, if "the dying man" be not Ireland, and "the wolf-pack freed" be not America, then those metaphors have no meaning to us. We offer no proof, and do not know that our position is susceptible of proof. We simply submit the opinion, and criticise the poet, if we are wrong, not for our want of knowledge certainly, but for not leaving thoughts so important free from reasonable misapprehension.

In that subdivision of the "Song of the Eng

lish," entitled "The Song of the Cities," the poet

makes Madras say:

"Clive kissed me on the mouth and eyes and brow,

Wonderful kisses, so that I became

Crowned above Queens-a withered beldame now,
Brooding on ancient fame."

"If I wished England ill," said the great and honest John Bright, "I should wish her another India." But it is not the province of the present treatise to discuss Lord Clive in India, and yet it will no doubt rob his devotion to Madras of its unmixed motive when we reflect on the opinion of such men as Mill and Macaulay pertaining to him, and make such evidences of affection as the above, so proudly told the old mother by her daughter in the Orient, as of rather questionable propriety. Macaulay says Mill looked upon Clive as a man "to whom deception, when it suited his purpose, never cost a pang;" and Macaulay says of him: "The truth seems to have been that he considered Oriental politics as a game in which nothing was unfair,' "who descended without scruple to falsehood, to hypocritical caresses, to the substitution of documents, and to the counterfeiting of hands." Now, if propriety is in any sense a part of poetry, there would be just as much propriety, and as many elements of poetry, more romance, and as much sincerity, had the poet made Surajah Dowlah shower those honeyed osculations on the capitol of the Carnatic, as for Clive to have left "the withered beldame" brooding on the ancient fame of "wonderful kisses" from the mouth of Gargantua, borrowed for a task greater than subduing the Sepoys-kissing "a whole city full!" And "O it was pitiful!"

Kipling makes very light of Bret Harte's figure

styling San Francisco "warder of two continents," yet he does not hesitate to style Halifax "The warden of the Honor of the North."

Cities are not generally regarded as sons, but in the good old mother's reply the poet has England say, "Sons, I have borne many sons, but my dugs are not dry," which would have been all right, had he written of the mythical maternal service rendered Romulus and Remus by a shewolf.

In "The Song of the English," Kipling makes his country speak to her children with the air of a kind-hearted despot. The imperial will is evident in every word of her counsel. Shall! Shall! Shall! "I shall know!" "Ye shall feel!" "The law ye make shall be law and I do not press my will." Why not press her will? From a sense of clemency? From a sense of justice? "Because ye are Sons of The Blood and call me Mother still!" A genuine John Bull response, and altogether too insular.

On the whole it seems to us the muse took a rather ordinary flight in "The Song of the English," for the grand themes of English dominion, English loyalty, English chivalry, "as the singer knew and touched them in the ends of all the earth,”—themes concerning a people more deserv

ing of a grand epic than "the Alban Fathers and the lofty walls of Rome."

"THE FIRST CHANTEY."

As a specimen of this "song" we quote the last stanza, since it is as well calculated as any of the eight to illustrate what a learned admirer of Mr. Kipling's, in writing of the Chanteys, sees fit to call "one of the poet's huge and happy temerities":

"Men that were hot in that hunt, women that followed, Babes that were promised our bones, trembled and wallowed

Over necks of the tribe crouching and fawning—

Prophet and priestess we came back from the dawning!"

Now, it requires a slight stretch of the imagination to bring the reader into the sense, however strange, of a full realization that such rare scenes as trembling men, women and babes "wallowing" over necks of a crouching tribe are "huge temerities" indeed, especially if the tribe is on the "warpath." Just what the poet means is partially compensated for by the ludicrous conception of the whole, and proves conclusively that our poet knows how "to think in images."

"MCANDREW'S HYMN."

This is one of the poet's most celebrated poems. In order to understand the hero fully one