good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural
expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought
themselves competent to teach him his business. This is the main, at
least the most dominant, note of _Pacchiarotto_. It is like an aftermath
of _Aristophanes' Apology_. But the English poet scarcely deigns to
defend his art. No beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on
his mettle and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics are
roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps"
officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." _Pacchiarotto_ is a
whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort
to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in
this _tour de force_, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to
killing the music. More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas _At the
Mermaid_, and _House_, he avails himself of the habitual reticence of
Shakespeare to defend by implication his own reserve, not without a
passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took Europe by storm with
the pageant of his broken heart. _House_ is for the most part rank
prose, but it sums up incisively in the well-known retort:

"'_With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart_,' once more!
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

This "house" image is singularly frequent in this volume. The poet seems
haunted by the idea of the barrier walls, which keep off the public
gaze, but admit the privileged spirit. In _Fears and Scruples_ it
symbolises the reticence of God. In _Appearances_ the "poor room" in
which troth was plighted and the "rich room" in which "the other word
was spoken" become half human in sympathy. A woman's "natural magic"
makes the bare walls she dwells in a "fairy tale" of verdure and song.