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 all his love-making, from the first desire to the final satiety, may be summed up in that famous axiom of Chamfort which Alfred de Musset, his female page or attendant dwarf, prefixed as a label to one of his decoctions of watered Byronism. Whatever he may have known of passion, he could put into verse of a genuine kind nothing beyond the range of the greater cynic's memorable definition; if he tries to go further or deeper, his verse rings hollow, his hold grows feeble, his colouring false and his tone inflated. Facit indignatto versum, and admirably too; the strength and splendour of his wrath give to his denunciations of tyranny a stronger and sincerer life than we find in his invocations to patriotism; in him Apollo was incarnate only as the dragon-slayer: he might stand so in sculpture with King George for Python, his arrow still quivering in the royal carrion. Of all divine labours that was the one which fell to his share of work; of all the god his master's gifts that was the one allotted him. But for positive passion, for that absolute fusion of the whole nature in one fire of sense and spirit which only the great dramatic students and masters of man can give or comprehend, we must go to poets of another kind. These have flesh and blood, muscle and nerve enough in all conscience; but passion with them means something beyond "l'échange de deux fantaisies et le contact de deux épidermes;" they want all that and more as fuel for their fires; they deal neither with soulless bodies nor with bodiless souls. Among them Ford must always hold a place of high honour. Two at least, yet perhaps only two, of his great fellow tragedians—for Shakespeare is of no fellowship—were certainly, in