The centenary of Swinburne's birth falls at a time when the excellences of Swinburne's poetry are unlikely to receive their due. In a recent study (1931), Mr. W. R. Rutland, writing as a professed admirer, suggests that Swinburne is as remote as the Elizabethans; he belongs to the past, as unquestionably as Hardy belongs to the present. He has not been dead thirty years; and yet it is not easily remembered that for the last ten years of his life he was currently accepted as the greatest living English poet. It is even more difficult to recall that from 1870 on to the end of the century his lyrical poetry was the purest written in England. Of all the great Victorian poets it was he who made the most direct attack upon the idols of his time, upon the sentimental conception of love, upon bourgeois democracy, upon the institutional expressions of the Christian religion. For his daring he has paid heavily: a sulphurous cloud still hangs over his name, his work has always had about it the aroma of heresy, revolt, and evil. He is the poet of passion, the poet of absolute liberty, the poet of evolution, the poet of tumultuous music. Passion is not now the staple of great literature that it was accounted ten years ago; absolute liberty is dismissed as a chimera, and those who believe in it may soon be obliged to follow Conrad's Garibaldino to the mythical republic of Costaguana; the emotional implications of evolution are no longer formative; tumultuous music seems vulgarly emphatic, like the nudes of Ingres and the landscapes of Turner. Swinburne is in danger of becoming a forgotten poet; and it is when a writer is in danger of being forgotten that his centenary should be seized upon as an occasion for evoking his achievement, turning it leisurely before our eyes and deciding whether or not literature will be served by quietly allowing him to recede in to a mere name in the an thologies along with Campbell and Rogers. There is still time enough, however, if Swinburne's achievement seems to justify it, for his place to be in greater company-with Byron, Keats, and Shelley.