ve had upon his
poetry. But he changed his name and went to Cambridge. And Cambridge
made a don of him. If anybody thinks this was an intelligent stroke,
let him consider the result. Calverley wrote a small amount of verse
that, merely as verse, is absolutely faultless. To compare great
things with little, you might as well try to alter a line of Virgil's
as one of Calverley's. Forget a single epithet and substitute another,
and the result is certain disaster. He has the perfection of the
phrase--and there it ends. I cannot remember a single line of
Calverley's that contains a spark of human feeling. Mr. Birrell
himself has observed that Calverley is just a bit inhuman. But the
cause of it does not seem to have occurred to him. Nor does the
biography explain it. If we are to believe the common report of all
who knew Calverley, he was a man of simple mind and sincere, of quick
and generous emotions. His biographers tell us also that he was one
who seemed to have the world at his feet, one who had only to choose a
calling to excel in it. Yet he never fulfilled his friends' high
expectations. What was the reason of it all?

The accident that cut short his career is not wholly to blame, I
think. At any rate, it will not explain away the exception I have
taken to his verse. Had that been destined to exhibit the humanity
which we seek, some promise of it would surely be discoverable; for he
was a full-grown man at the time of that unhappy tumble on the ice.
But there is none. It is all sheer wit, impish as a fairy
changeling's, and always barren of feeling. Mr. Birrell has not
supplied the explanatory epithet, so I will try to do so. It is
"donnish." Cambridge, fondly imagining that she was showing right
appreciation of Calverley thereby, gave him a Fellowship. Mr. Walter
Besant, another gentleman from Calverley's college, complained, the
other day, that literary distinction was never marked with a peerage.
It is the same sort of error. And now Cambridge, having made
Calverley a don, claims him as a Cambridge poet; and the claim is
just, if the epithet be intended to mark the limitations imposed by
that University on his achievement.

"J.K.S."

Of "J.K.S.," whose second volume, _Quo Musa Tendis?_ (Macmillan &
Bowles), has just come from the press, it is fashionable to say that
he follows after Calverley, at some distance. To be sure, he himself
has encouraged this belief by coming from Cambridge and writing about
Cambr