Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/77

 in some lovely Highland loch, with the inimitable, yet questionable, pictures of Parisian life left by Paul de Kock;" landsman and seaman, Londoner and Scotchman, Delian and Patarene Buchanan. How should one address him?

As Janus rather, one would think, being so in all men's sight a natural son of the double-faced divinity. Yet it might be well for the son of Janus if he had read and remembered in time the inscription on the statue of another divine person, before taking his name in vain as a word wherewith to revile men born in the ordinary way of the flesh:—

Youngsters I who write false names, and slink behind The honest garden-god to hide yourselves, Beware!"

In vain would I try to play the part of a prologuizer before this latest rival of the Hellenic dramatists, who sings from the height of "mystic realism," not with notes echoed from a Grecian strain, but as a Greek poet himself might have sung, in "massive grandeur of style," of a great contemporary event. He alone is fit, in Euripidean fashion, to prologuize for himself.