of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human
nature in unadorned nakedness. _Donald_ is an exposure, savage and
ugly, of savagery and ugliness in Sport; _Solomon and Balkis_ a
reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the
dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. Lilith and Eve unmask
themselves under stress of terror, as Balkis and Solomon at the
compulsion of the magic ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask.
Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his
deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of
the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is,
as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of
striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality. Lover, poet,
soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong
and enrich the saint's: but their fresh idealisms have withered when
grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom
fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples.
But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In the
great poem of _Ixion_, human illusions are still the preoccupying
thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead
of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic
deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from
his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating
cry of defiance to the phantom-god--man's creature and his ape--who may
plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that

"From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment
Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o'er him,
Pallid birth of my pain--where light, where light is, aspiring,
Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus take thy godship and sink."