Considerable, indeed, would be the loss to English literature if by any chance the productions of our noble poets should disappear. Apart from Byron, who, of course, stands a head and shoulders above all his brethren, there is that Henry, Earl of Surrey, who ranks highest of all poets between Chaucer and Spenser, and who did so much to popularize in England both blank verse and the sonnet. But for Surrey both those accomplishments, since so popular among us, might have been long in establishing themselves in English poetry. The other poet-peers of the sixteenth century were admittedly not of the first class. Yet Buckhurst's share in 'The Mirror for Magistrates' and in the tragedy of 'Gorboduc' was of undoubted value, 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.