nd not allowed their material to master them. Watson, it is true, has
attained to a much less firm and spontaneous style than Davidson, but it
would be false to say of him that he is, in point of diction, the
imitator of any poet in especial, or that he moulds his style upon
Tennyson more than on Milton, or upon Milton more than on Wordsworth.
And what is true of their form is true of their matter. They think with
their own brains and feel with their own natures. They fall back upon no
master and no fashion to direct them what to say or leave unsaid.
Whatever opinion we may form of their force and range, we cannot but
recognise that it is themselves whom they are expressing. And it may be
taken as an axiom that nothing so commends the man who speaks to the
interest of the man who listens as this--the fact that the speaker is
telling his own thought. That, I believe, is the secret of the hold
which Browning possesses upon his votaries, and which Goethe will for
all time exercise.

We recognise with both our poets that this initial charm is theirs, and
if we find in Davidson the richer nature and the more robust, the more
infused with Browning's rough, virile strain, we are no less confident
that Watson's verse is the natural cream gathered from his daintier and
more purely intellectual moods. But in thus comparing the men I
anticipate my evidence.

The poems of John Davidson upon which I have based my judgment are those
contained in the _Fleet Street Eclogues_ (the first and second series),
and in the volume of _Ballads and Songs_. The name of the latter
explains itself. In the former are contained some dozen pieces, written
in dialogue, in various metres. The interlocutors are London journalists
and poets, who meet in Fleet Street on such holidays as Lammas, May Day,
Michaelmas, and the New Year, and there hold a kind of discursive
symposium on such themes as then and there present themselves. I mildly
call the discussion "discursive," though it would be fair in one or two
instances to dub the piece frankly a medley. Usually the special holiday
suggests a reference to the charms of nature as they are to be seen in
the country at that date, and as they are, alas! not to be seen in Fleet
Street. This device affords scope for not a few charming word-pictures,
as simple in outline and as complete in suggestion as the drawings of
flowers and tree sprays made by the Japanese, and as effective in the
artistic directness and s