Between the death of Byron and the distinct appearance of Tennyson and the Brownings there was a kind of interregnum or twilight of poetry, of which one of its strangest if not least illuminative stars or meteors, Beddoes, has given a graphic but uncomplimentary picture in a letter: "owls' light" he calls it, with adjuncts. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; Scott, Campbell, and Moore, were all living, but the poetic production of all had on the whole ceased. Shelley and Keats would have been in time the natural, and in genius the more than sufficient sun and moon of the time; but they had died before Byron. So the firmament was occupied by rather wandering stars: some of them elders already noticed, others born in the ten or twelve years between Keats (1795) and the eldest of the Tennysons (1807). The chief of these were the pair of half-serious, half-humorous singers, Hood and Praed. Next in public estimation come Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, Macaulay, Sir Henry Taylor, the Irish poet Mangan, R. H. Horne, and the first Lord Lytton; while a third class--of critics' rather than readers' favourites--varying in merit, but, at the best of the best of them, ranking higher than any of the above, may be made up of George Darley, C. J. Wells, the Dorsetshire poet Barnes, Beddoes, Charles Whitehead, R. S. Hawker, and Thomas Wade. To the second class must be added "L. E. L.," the poetess who filled the interval between Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Browning. Wells, Whitehead, and Wade may be dismissed without disrespect as, if not critical mares'-nests, at any rate critical hobbies. Persons of more or less distinction (and of less or more crotchet) have at different times paid very high compliments to the _Joseph and his Brethren_ (1823, revised later) of Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800-1879), a friend of Keats, and a person who seems to have lived much as he pleased; to the _Solitary_ of Charles Whitehead (1804-1862), a Bohemian ne'er-do-weel, who also showed talent as a novelist and miscellanist; and to the _Mundi et Cordis Carmina_ (1835) of Thomas Wade (1805-1875), a playwright and journalist. Of the three, Wade appears to me to have had the greatest poetical talent. But I do not think that any one who on the one hand uses epithets in poetical criticism with caution, and on the other has read a great deal of minor poetry as it appears, could put any one of them very high. All were born late enough to breathe the atmosphere of the new poetry young; all had poetical velleities, and a certain amount, if not of originality, of capacity to write poetry. But they were not poets; they were only poetical curiosities.