lue, both intrinsic and relative; and the
world of letters would not willingly let die the work, slight as it was,
of Lord Vaux, the Earls of Essex and Oxford, the Earls of Ancrum and
Stirling, Lord Brooke, and Francis Bacon, although the great Chancellor
wrote but one lyric of any moment--the well-known lines upon 'The
World.' Lord Vaux's 'Of a Contented Mind,' Lord Essex's 'There is None,
O None but You,' Lord Oxford's 'If Woman could be Fair and yet not
Fond,' are among the treasures of our verse; while the tragedies of Lord
Stirling and Lord Brooke, and the sonnets of Lord Ancrum, are at least
curious and interesting, if they are not substantively great.

And when we come to the noble poets of the Stuart and the early Georgian
period, we find that the national indebtedness is not less marked. Who
would be prepared to surrender the spirited effusions of Montrose? And
is there not much to be said for the outcome, flimsy and over-free as it
often was, of that mob of noblemen who wrote with ease--including the
Earls of Roscommon, Dorset, and Rochester, and the Duke of
Buckinghamshire? Had these writers not at least the virtues of lightness
and of brightness? Did not Dorset pen the lines, 'To all you ladies now
on land?' Did not Buckinghamshire produce 'The Election of the
Laureat'--the prototype of Leigh Hunt's 'Feast of the Poets,' and of a
still more recent _jeu d'esprit_ by Mr. Robert Buchanan? The great Lord
Peterborough is even now less remembered for his military triumphs than
for his 'Song by a Person of Quality;' while Chesterfield, if thought of
most frequently in connection with his letters and his essays, still
lives in poetry as the author of some admirable society verses. Horace
Walpole claims mention in the list as Earl of Orford, and room must
fairly be made, too, for Lords Lansdowne, Halifax, Nugent, Lyttelton,
Egremont, and De la Warre, most of whom left behind them a few fugitive
pieces which deserve to be embalmed in poetical collections.

The annals of nineteenth-century song will commemorate, besides Byron,
those agreeable versifiers--Lord Holland, Lord Melbourne, and Lord
Winchilsea, and those cultured translators--Lord Strangford, Lord
Ellesmere, and Lord Derby. It would scarcely be fair to include among
noble poets Lord Macaulay, Lord Houghton, or the first Lord Lytton, for
they, like Lord Tennyson, were created peers, and won their
laurel-wreaths in the character of commoners. In the same way, I