Robustness, sometimes giving way to an affectation of the robust, has always been the leading characteristic of Mr. Chesterton's work, both in prose and verse. This preference for size and strength has led him to select exceptionally large men—Sunday, Flambeau, Innocent Smith—to be the heroes of his romances, to employ words and phrases on account of their general largeness, to use superlatives and all the tricks of emphasis, often at a heavy cost. If Mr. Chesterton's poetry at its best suggests music, as good poetry must, it degenerates at times into the sort of music we associate with a crude open-air band. Fortunately for us, however, the robustness we have mentioned has not always the peculiar brazen quality of this class of music. The large and healthy laughter of some of the ‘Rhymes for the Times' has not a false note in it. The lines addressed to Mr. Walter Long and Mr. F. E. Smith are joyous commentaries on statements made in unguarded moments, and the ‘Ballades’ at the end of the book have the true ring. In the ‘Love Poems’ too, and the ‘Three Dedications,’ we feel that Mr. Chesterton is being truly himself. But we suspect the sincerity of some of the other pieces. The author's imagery is varied, but it consistently returns to the language of battle. It is therefore natural that he should attempt to describe battles. In previous books of verse he has made the battles of Gibeon and Ethandune the subjects of flamboyant lines. In the book before us the longest poem is ‘Lepanto,’ a rough, irregular composition ringing with energetic staccato notes. But an unrestrained rhetoric robs the poem of much of the impression it was undoubtedly meant to produce. So too, in the ‘Sonnet to a popular leader much to be congratulated on the avoidance of a strike at Christmas,’ we feel at once that the indignation is too rhetorical:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          And I say
It would be better for such men as we,
And we be nearer Bethlehem, if we lay
Shot dead on scarlet snows for liberty,
Dead in the daylight upon Christmas Day.

Instead of robustness Mr. Chesterton occasionally achieves language perilously near rodomontade. At other times the same striving after largeness of effect yields verses such as this:—

So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped
the golden weather,
The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men
buy and sell;
But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the
flaring feather,
For the light of seven heavens that are lost to
me like hell.

One of the least satisfactory features of Mr. Chesterton's work, in prose as in verse, is the obvious rapidity of its composition. Endowed as few are with the gift of the use of words, he scatters his good things recklessly. His work nearly always conveys the impression that it awaits a final and profitable revision. This is specially to be deplored in one who, when he has chosen, has shown a remarkable succinctness and exactness of expression, and whose ideas are generally well worth careful formulation. ‘The Higher Unity’, for example, is written with a verbal neatness recalling Hood at his best. The little book before us contains a selection of Mr. Chesterton's poems written on a wide variety of subjects during several years. In it both his best and his worst work are represented, and his best in verse is very good—some way, we think, above his achievements in prose. His prose may be better known; it is his verse that deserves to survive.