The Clarendon Press offers a pleasant version of Byron in
Mr. V. H. Collins's Selected Letters (4s. 6d.). Whether intended for school use or not, this neat volume is perfectly suitable for it ; and nothing could have been devised more likely to reconcile the average schoolboy to the idea of poetry than the acquaintanceship with a poet that these letters give. For the ordinary reader the selection is a little niggardly, both in quality and quantity, but the cream of Byron's correspondence is given. We have the outburst to Hobhouse on the subject of Rubens—" Such an assemblage of florid nightmares . . . his portraits seem clothed in pulpit cushions "—the enter- taining reminiscences of his friend Matthews, the letter to Moore in which he wrote, " So we'll go no more a-roving " and the other with " My boat is on the shore." Keats some- times enclosed poems with his letters, but Byron broke into verse in that fresh, vital, full-blooded manner which he alone of the Romantics possessed. He was less of a poet than Keats, but nearer to the Elizabethans, especially when he wrote to John Murray, refusing indignantly to undertake a
great work." " If one's years can't be better employed than in sweating poesy, a man had better be a ditcher." He is also nearer to the Georgians than his contemporary poet- letter-writers, and the Georgians should not miss this new opportunity to be amused.
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