interpretation in which only the songs are good. The proof rests on the fact that out of each one hundred lines 20.16 per cent have extra syllables; whereas in the 1842 volume the percentage was 5.8. In the Idylls, except for those written in the earlier period, there are many licenses taken to secure a dramatic realism and an ease of flow. The list is impressive, and includes counter cesural inversions, weak measures, epic cesuras, double endings, final tribrachs, weak feminine endings (p. 205). Indeed Tennyson himself is censured for saying that he wrote the poems with ease and little correction, and for admitting that he varied the verse to suit the changing character of the theme. Finally in his last work, Tennyson shows a tendency to revert to his youthful practice of experimentation; only now the experimentation is not in historical English forms but in classical meters. When he is not writing these interesting studies, which are nevertheless not poems, he betrays his histrionic tendency by writing dramas. This unnatural absorption in the dramatic, which Professor Pyre suggests may have been partly due to the influence of Browning (p. 153, 163, 190), is seen most conspicuously in the morbid impetuosity of Maud. If a norm is to be looked for in this period, it is to be found in a delight in three stress and six stress verse units and irregular and trochaic or dactylic rhythms (p. 222: note p. 209). Professor Pyre's monograph concludes with two interesting appendices. The second establishes a probability that Tennyson, and not Browning, originated the Locksley Hall meter. The first consists of an analysis of the diction of the early poems. The result of this analysis is a correction of the views of J. C. Collins (Tennyson's Early Poems, London, 1900), who had emphasized the influence upon Tennyson of his immediate predecessors. After a comparative study of his diction, Professor Pyre concludes that Tennyson was under greater influence from Milton and Shakespeare in his formative years than from Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge. The influence of Coleridge is negligible. That of Shelley is found in those passages in which Shelley himself has been indebted to Milton. The early and very transient influence of Byron is similar to that of Shelley in character (p.74). The above outline is sufficient to show that Professor Pyre has done a service in proving by a painstaking statistical analysis what has often been said of Tennyson: that by a careful apprenticeship and a constant rewriting, Tennyson had succeeded by 1842 in bringing his exuberance of descriptive powers under control and in establishing comparatively simple verse forms which he modulated in less obvious ways than previously. But unfortunately Professor Pyre has not limited himself to this service alone. He has allowed much purely literary material to creep into a monograph that begins as a technical treatise. When he gets to the period after 1842, which he calls decadent because the normal verse forms he has set up for Tennyson are being discarded or loosely used, he gives only cursory summaries of his technical material and supplements such statements with literary speculations which he does not support with any detailed reasoning. The critic would not feel forced to object to this broadening of the scope of the work simply because it leads to a superficiality of treatment. He must object also to the critical point of view which Professor Pyre assumes to justify it. Professor Pyre is still a Pre-Raphaelite, and believes a poem to consist of a pattern of musical words built out of some inconspicuous abstraction. Even in this present day, when there are many iconoclasts who find Tennyson insipid and effeminate, Professor Pyre may be pardoned for his several references to the finality and perfection of Tennyson's poetry at its best (pp. 50, 148, 156-60). But there are few to-day who will not find objectionable the almost complete disregard of sense in favor of sound which is inevitable in a treatise that attempts a half esthetic, half technical analysis of metrics. The reader does not have to hunt in the dark for proof of Professor Pyre's preference for form instead of content. In his criticism of The Princess Professor Pyre states by inference his critical canon: "It is quite plain that the theme and the stuff of his poetry came to occupy him somewhat to the exclusion of its architectonics, its technical detail, and its atmosphere. By 1869, he who once bade fair to be a very king among the PreRaphaelites was in a mood to hail 'Art for Art's sake' as 'truest Lord of Hell.'" (p. 164). Professor Pyre, who admires Tennyson only when he is a lyric poet, finds no compensation for what he considers faulty meter in the philosophy of such works as Vastness, De Profundis, and The Higher Pantheism, or in such characterizations as those of Launcelot and Guinevere, of Lucretius and Virgil. Blind to these aspects of the poet, the author of the treatise before us is not unwilling to pluck from The Ancient Sage such lyrical insipidities as the following stanza to illustrate a surviving beauty in a period of decay (p. 220): The years that when my youth began Had set the lily and rose By all my ways, where'er they ran, My rose of love forever gone, My lily of truth and trust, They made her lily and rose in one Such a critical method, arising from a supposedly scholarly treatment of metrics, the reviewer would find himself inclined to decry, if it were not so palpably a mid-Victorian survival. Shorn of its esthetic criticism, Professor Pyre's work retains a 1 certain value for students of English prosody. But those readers who desire a sound critical survey of Tennyson's earlier years, of which a study of verse structure forms a subordinate element, had best confine themselves to Lounsbury's Life and Times of Tennyson (1809-1850). EDWIN BERRY BURGUM University of Illinois Three series of monographs are published by the University of Illinois, as indicated below. Each series is published quarterly. The total number of pages in a volume of four numbers is about 600, but the size of the individual numbers varies considerably. $3.00 a year for each series. STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Financial History of Ohio, by E. L. BOGART ($1.80). The History of the General Property Tax in Illinois, by R. M. HAIG ($1.25). Friedrich Gents: an opponent of the French Revolution and Napoleon, by P. F. REIFF ($0.80). 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