Algernon Charles Swinburne; A Study

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ... very crown and flower of all her father's daughters--I do not speak here of her human father, but her divine--the woman above all Shakespeare's women is Imogen. As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the women everlasting, so in Imogen we find half glorified already the immortal godhead of womanhood. I would fain have some honey in my words at parting--with Shakespeare never, but for ever with these notes on Shakespeare; and I am therefore something more than fain to close my book upon the name of the woman best beloved in all the world of song and all the tide of time--upon the name of Shakespeare's Imogen.' In 1886 two prose volumes of Swinburne A study of saw the Kght: one, A Study of victor Victor Hugo, a comprehensive Hugo, 1886. 1 r, critical study of the poetic achievements of the French poet; the other, a large and heterogeneous collection of critical essays bound together under the title of Miscellanies. The latter volume contains critical work Miscel-as fine as any which has been aclanies, 1886. complished by Swinburne. There is perhaps no beauty in the book like the beauty of the prose in Essays and Studies, no passage in it which, apart from its critical interest, can be quoted for the sake of its style or colour as an example of prose as beautiful as verse. But it is a riper, stronger, wiser book than its predecessor, the Essays and Studies. From the Miscellanies one derives the impression even of a certain geniality, although such passages as might be selected for examples of the writer's humour are on the face of them filled with a savage irony. A kindly humour, a tolerant appreciation of less gifted or less fortunate workmen. than himself, a grace of humanity, are things not to be looked for in Swinburne. As...