promised ponder.

It would be futile to discuss the exact position on Parnassus of a lady
whose throne was secured on a more celestial mountain, even more
difficult of access. But I think we may claim for her an honourable
place in that new Oxford school of poetry of which Professor Mackail
officially knows little, and of which Dr. Warren (the President of
Magdalen) is the distinguished living protagonist. With all her acrid
Evangelicalism she was a good soul, for she was fond of animals and
children, and kind to them both in her own way; so I am sure some of her
dreams have been realised, even if there has reached her nostrils just a
whiff of those tolerating purgatorial fires which, spelt differently, she
believed to be _permanently_ prepared for the vast majority of her
contemporaries.

_To_ MRS. CAREW.

GOING UP TOP.

During the closing years of the last century certain critics contracted a
rather depressing habit of numbering men of letters, especially poets, as
though they were overcoats in a cloak-room, or boys competing in an
examination set by themselves. 'It requires very little discernment,'
wrote the late Churton Collins, A.D. 1891, 'to foresee that among the
English poets of the present century the first place will _ultimately_ be
assigned to Wordsworth, the second to Byron, and the third to Shelley.'
Matthew Arnold, I fear, was the first to make these unsafe Zadkielian
prognostications. He, if I remember correctly, gave Byron the first
place and Wordsworth the second; but Swinburne, with his usual
discernment, observed that English taste in that eventuality would be in
the same state as it was at the end of the seventeenth century, which
firmly believed that Fletcher and Jonson were the best of its poets.

But when is Ultimately? Obviously not the present moment. Byron does
not hold the rank awarded him by the distinguished critic in 1891. The
cruel test of the auctioneer's hammer has recently shown that Keats and
Shelley are regarded as far more important by those unprejudiced judges,
the book-dealers. Wordsworth, of course, is still one of the poets'
poets, and the _Spectator_, that Mrs. Micawber of literature, will, of
course, never desert him; but I doubt very much whether he has yet
reached the harbour of Ultimately. His repellent personality has blinded
a good many of us to his exquisite qualities; on the Greek Kalends of
criticism, however, may I be there to see. I shall cert