watching his angry critic run amuck through adjectives with frenzied agility. Such sentences as "the blundering, floundering, lumbering, and stumbling stanzas of Childe Harold, … the gasping, ranting, wheezing, broken-winded verse, … the hideous absurdities and jolter-headed jargon," must surely be less deeply offensive to Lord Byron's admirers than to Mr. Swinburne's. They come as near to describing the noble beauty of Childe Harold as does Southey's senseless collection of words to describing the cataract of Lodore, or any other cataract in existence; and, since the days when Milton and Salmasius hurled "Latin billingsgate" at each other's heads, we have had no stronger argument in favor of the comeliness of moderation.
"The most part of Mr. Swinburne's criticism," hints a recent reviewer, "is surely very much of a personal matter,—personal, one may say, in expression as well as in sensation." He has always a "neat hand at an epithet," and the "jolter-headed jargon" of Byron is no finer in its way than the "fanfaronade and falsetto of Gray." But even the charms of alliteration, joined to the fish-wife's slang
