Now the public, mistakenly called fools, are perfectly aware of the Superannuated. They see his signature affixed to many of the Little Poets Booms, and ask each other with smiling tolerance, “What has he done?” Nothing. “Oh! Then how does he know?” Ah, that is his secret! He thinks he knows; and he wants you, excellent Fool-Public, to believe he thinks he knows! And, under the pleasing delusion that you always have your Fool’s Cap on, and never take it off under any circumstances, he “discovers” Mr. Podgers for you. Who is Mr. Podgers? A poet. If we are to credit the Superannuated, he is “a new star on the literary horizon, of the first magnitude.” The “first magnitude”!--the public shakes its caps and bells in amused scepticism. Another Shelley? Another Byron? These were of the “first magnitude,” and shall we thank a bounteous heaven for one more such as these? No, no, nothing of the sort, says the Superannuated with indignation, for it is high time you put this sort of Shelley-Byron stuff behind you. Mr. Swinburne has distinctly said that “Byron was no poet.” Learn wisdom, therefore, and turn from Byron to Podgers. He has written a little book, has Podgers, for which those who desire to possess it must pay a sum out of all proportion to its size. What shall we find in this so-little book? Anything to make our hearts beat in more healthful and harmonious tune? No. Nothing of this in Podgers. Nothing, in fact, of any kind in Podgers which we have not heard before. There are a few lines that we remember as derived from Wordsworth, and one stanza seems to us like a carefully transposed bit of Tennyson;--but for anything absolutely new in thought or in treatment we search in vain. Unless we make exception for a set of verses which are a tribute to the art of Log-Rolling, namely Podgers’s “Ode” to Podgers’s favouring critic. We confess this to be somewhat of a novelty, and we begin to pity Podgers. He must have fallen very low to write (and publish) an “Ode” to the Superannuated, his chief flatterer on the Press, and he must be very short-sighted if he imagines that action is a millstone _without_ a hole in it. And so, despite the loud eulogies of the Superannuated (who is naturally proud to be made the subject of any “Ode” however feeble) we do not purchase Podgers’s book, though it is urged upon us as being a “limited” edition. But the Superannuated is not herein baffled. If, he says, if you are so asinine, so crass, so dull and dense of comprehension as to reject this marvellous, this classic Podgers, what say you to Stodgers? Stodgers is a “young” poet (forty-five last birthday), entirely free from “manner” and manners. He has resorted to the last and lowest method employed by Little Poets for obtaining temporary notoriety, namely,--outraging decency. Coarseness and blasphemy are the prevailing themes of his verse, but to the Superannuated these grave blemishes constitute “power.” A “strong” line is a lewd line; a