CONTENTS. I. The English Ode. By LAURENCE BINYON, F.R.S.L. II. "Idylls of the King" in 1921. By F. S. Boas, III. Some Writers on English Country Life. By the Most Hon. the MARQUESS OF CREWE, K.G., IV. Some Memorialists of the Period of the Restoration. PAGE INTRODUCTION. BY THE EDITOR. THE essays in this little volume range over a wide field, though all except one are concerned with our own country and its literature. The first, on "The English Ode," is the work of one who is a poet as well as a critic of poetry. He admits the difficulty of defining an ode, since our English usage has given the name not only to impassioned lyrics and heroic songs, but to the carefully chiselled and unemotional "Carmina" of Horace, which he never himself called odes. Horace himself is responsible for the delusion that Pindar wrote numeris lege solutis; and our " Pindaric Odes," of which Dryden's "Alexander's Feast" is perhaps the finest, take advantage of the licence which Horace thought he found in Pindar, but forebore to imitate. Mr. Binyon reminds us how many of the greatest poems in English are odes-Milton's splendid "Ode on the Nativity," Spenser's twin marriage-poems, Marvell's singularly virile Horatian “Ode in Honour of Cromwell," and Shelley's "Skylark." He pays a just tribute to the best of Tennyson's laureate odes, and to the fine poem of Meredith about France in 1871. Many readers will be interested to learn that Wordsworth's famous "Ode |