In its original meaning “popularity” signifies a courting of the popular favor; it is only in its modern and secondary use that the word takes the sense of a gaining of that good-will. Our old writers employed the word with a certain flavor of obsequiousness hanging about it. Among the Elizabethans to be “popular” was to have resigned something of the dignity of independent judgment. We have lost all that in these democratic days, and he is held the most honorable man who has contrived to please the largest number of individual voters, and that book the most successful which has appealed to the largest number of readers. Yet, even with us, literary popularity has not quite come to be synonymous with largeness of sales. We are not so mechanically statistical, even in the matter of our novels, and there are writers whose works sell in vast masses, who enjoy a kind of blind, contemptuous success, and who yet are scarcely to be called “popular.” There are writers, too, of comic or sentimental verse, who are never mentioned among the poets, whose sales, nevertheless, by far exceed those of Mr. Swinburne. I remember how once, in the sacred Lodge of Trinity, and to the face of its fastidious master, the late Lord Houghton contended that the most prominent living poet of England was the writer of a song called “The Old Obadiah and the Young Obadiah.” At the moment when this whimsical theory was put forth, England possessed a poet of unsurpassed popularity. The case of Tennyson was a singular and, for future generations, a disturbing one. As we look down the history of our country, we may be surprised to see how few of our greatest bards have enjoyed wide popular favor in their life-time. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton, neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge, neither Shelley nor Keats, had any experience of general public acceptance. Dryden and Ben Jonson were illustrious,—they were scarcely popular. Among our really ambitious writers in verse, Cowley and Pope, Burns and Byron, and in his latest years Robert Browning, have alone enjoyed great popularity at all approaching that of Tennyson; and of these Burns is the most remarkable in this respect. Tennyson and Burns, a couple strangely assorted,—these are the two great names in poetry which have achieved, by purely poetic qualities, a lasting approbation from the people of Great Britain.