elegy on the irreparable loss which
the country had just suffered--compositions implying a suggestion on the
part of each of the elegists that a poet existed who was not unfit to
repair it. That same day after luncheon the two competitors departed.
Our hostess and the other guests saw them off at the station, and as the
train went on, the elegists were seen waving independent adieux, one
from a first, the other from a third-class carriage. The successor to
the late Laureate was Mr. Alfred Austin.

I knew Alfred Austin well; and a few words with regard to him may not be
inappropriate here. Though his poetry has not commanded any very wide
attention, he had more of true poetry in him than many people imagine.
He had all the qualifications of a really great poet except a sustained
faculty for writing really good poetry. He had a sound philosophic
conception of what the scope and functions of great poetry are; and it
would be possible to select from his works isolated passages of high and
complete beauty. But, if judged by his poetry as a whole, he seems to
have been so indolent or so deficient in the faculty of self-criticism
that for the most part he suffered himself to be content with language
which resembled an untuned piano, his performances on which were often
calculated to affront the attention of his audience rather than to
arrest and capture it. He once or twice asked me to make his works the
subject of a critical and comprehensive essay. With some diffidence I
consented, and accomplished this delicate task by picking out a number
of his best and most carefully finished passages, which showed what he
could do if he tried, and how far by pure carelessness he elsewhere fell
short of the standard which he himself had set. For example, from his
"Human Tragedy" I quoted the following lines, one of which refers to
Rome as a place where "Papal statues arrogantly wave"; while in another,
describing a headlong stream, he says with the utmost complacency that:

The cascade
Bounded adown the cataract.

I pointed out that no conceivable feat was so absolutely impossible for
a statue as that of "waving," and that, a cataract and a cascade being
practically the same thing, it was impossible that the former could
manage to bound down the latter. My practical moral, as addressed to
the Laureate, was, "Be just to yourself, and the public will be just to
you," and the compliment implied in one part of this criticism did