Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/245

 man living, in my mind, who might be trusted to correct the metre of Shelley; and among all past poets of his own rank I know of none who might have been so trusted but Milton. And it is no less an enterprise than this that Mr. Rossetti has taken upon himself. Surely, too, his scholarship was somewhat at fault when he likened to the English of Mrs. Gamp the use of an obsolete and doubtless a licentious construction in "Rosalind and Helen"—

My Lionel, who, as every strain Grew fainter but more sweet, his mien Sunk—"

here altered by the excision of the word who and the substitution of a period for a comma, which compels us to begin a fresh sentence with the following words. Even were the original reading a mere solecism, it would be preferable to such drawing and quartering of a poet's text as this. But it is simply a revival—indefensible indeed in my eyes, and probably due to mere haste—of a lax usage permitted to elder writers both in verse and prose. If all texts are to be regulated after this pedagogic fashion, neither Shakespeare nor even Milton will be secure against correction. The poem in which this passage occurs, certainly the least precious example we have of Shelley's mature work, was, as we know, resumed and completed at the desire of Mrs. Shelley after it had been cast aside as not worth completion; and we may well suppose that the task was executed rapidly and with little of the passionate pleasure that impels and informs the execution of work into which the workman can put