Judged by this, Bunner undoubtedly is our chief writer of _vers de société_, our laureate of the trivial. He is restrained, refined, faultless. He is of the artificial world, where fans flutter and dancers glide and youth is perennial. Triolets penciled in the program while the orchestra breathed its melody, epigrams over the tea-cups, conceits for a fan, _amours de voyage_, lines written on the menu, _amoretti_, valentines--these are his work, and no one has done them more daintily or with more skill of touch. Trifles they are, to be sure, yet Bunner, like every master of the form, makes of them more than trifles. A hint of tears there may be, the faintest breath of irony, the suspicion, vague as an intuition, of satire or facetiousness or philosophy, the high spirits and the carelessness of youth, yet a flash here and there into the deeps of life as, for instance, in "Betrothed" and "A Poem in the Programme," and "She was a Beauty in the Days when Madison was President." The French forms, imported echoes of Dobson and Lang and Gosse--ballades, rondels, rondeaux, and the like, that so bewitched the younger poets of the mid-eighties--found in Bunner perhaps their most skilful American devotee. Perhaps no one but he has ever succeeded in English with the chant royal, or has found it possible to throw into that most trivial of all verse forms, triolets, a throb of life, as in "A Pitcher of Mignonette": A pitcher of mignonette In a tenement's highest casement: Queer sort of flower-pot--yet That pitcher of mignonette Is a garden in heaven set, To the little sick child in the basement-- The pitcher of mignonette, In the tenement's highest casement. The period, especially in its later years, has run abundantly to these trivial, though difficult, forms of verse. As poetry ceased more and more to be a thing of vision and compelling power, it became more and more a thing of daintiness and brilliancy. The American _Lyra Elegantiarum_ for the period has been more sparkling and abundant than the English, more even than the French. John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) belongs almost wholly to the days of Holmes and Lowell, but the greater number of our trivial makers fall into the group that was active during the closing quarter of the century. To mention all of them would be to call the roll of the younger American poets. Perhaps the most noteworthy, however, are Mary Mapes Dodge (1838-1905), whose dainty and tender "The Minuet" gives her a place in the choir; James Jeffrey Roche (1847-1908); Walter Learned (1847----); Richard Kendall Munkittrick (1853-1911); Samuel Minturn Peck (1854----), in many respects the most delightful of the group; Clinton Scollard (1860----); John Kendrick Bangs (1862----), and such modern instances as Oliver Herford, Gelett Burgess, and Carolyn Wells. One might, indeed, collect a notable anthology of _vers de société_ from the files of _Life_ alone. V