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All his poetry that is good, I say, has been done at a rush. The dramatic touches in it are as frequent as they are fine. Take, for instance, this from the “Rhyme of Joyous Guard.”—Lancelot, old, worn-out, feeling that “there is nothing good for him under the sun but to perish as” (his bright past) “has perished,” is thinking of the close of his career and Arthur’s: of the discovery of his amour with Guinevere, his siege in Joyous Guard, his encounters with “brave Gawain,” whom he virtually slew, and then “the crime of Modred,” and “the king by the knave’s hand stricken”—

“And the once-loved knight, was he there to save

that knightly king who that knighthood gave?

Ah, Christ! will he greet me as knight or knave

in the day when the dust shall quicken?”

This is splendid! And, as I have said, it by no means stands alone. As a set-off against this excellence of his, is the defect of prolixity. Byron had it, but Byron was an unsurpassed improviser, not an artist. Like, too, his technical master of the “Poems and Ballads” when he gets hold of a regular or rymed rhythm that pleases him, Gordon will go on making it “ring,” listening as the “verse-jingle chimes,” till we are all quite weary of it. He is regardless of what Goethe calls “the æsthetic whole.” Indeed, it may justly be said that few, very few, of his poems are “æsthetic wholes” at all, but only passages.