will be ready in a few days.” And here, it may as well be said for the rectitude of “Goose and Gridiron,” things came to a standstill. Because the Little Poets seldom get beyond a second edition. When Podgers’s first editions came back unsold from the provinces (as they did), attempts were made to dispose of them at fancy prices as a last resource,--such attempts naturally ending in disaster. The times are too hard, and people have too much to do with their money to part with any of it for first editions of Podgers or Stodgers. The public is a very shrewd one, moreover, and is not to be “taken in” by gnat-rhymers dancing up and down for an hour in the “discoverer’s” artificial sunbeams. And the Superannuated, in his eager desire to assert himself as an oracular personage, forgets one very important fact, and this is, that being a Nobody he cannot be accepted as warrant for a Somebody. The public is not his child; he cannot whip it into admiring Mr. Podgers, or coerce its judgment respecting Mr. Stodgers. Its ways are wilful, and it has a ridiculous habit (considering what a Fool the critic imagines it to be) of preferring its own opinion to that of the Superannuated. It is capable, it thinks, what with Compulsory Education and the rest of it, of making its own choice. And on the whole it prefers the Great Poet,--the man who scorns to be “discovered” by an inferior intellect, and who makes his own way independently and with a grand indifference to the squabbling of Log-rollers. He is not “made”; he forms part of the country’s blood and life; he chants the national thought in haunting rhythm as did the prophet bards of old; he, careless of “pence,” praise or fame, does so mix himself with his land’s history, that he becomes, as it were the very voice of the age in which he lives, and the Superannuated may ignore him as he will, he cannot get him out of the nation’s heart when he has once got in. But of the feeble, absurdly conceited tribe of Little Poets who come jostling one upon another nowadays in such a puling crowd, piping out their wretchedly small personalities in versed pessimism or coarse metaphor,--men “made” by the Tavern-publisher and the Superannuated Failure;--we have had enough of these, and more than enough. Too much good paper, good ink and good binding are wasted on their totally undesired productions. Life with us now is lived at too hard and too difficult a pace for any one to need poetry that is _only_ verse. Hearts break every day in the truest sense of that sentimental phrase; brains reel into insanity and the darkness of suicide; and it is no Little Poet’s personal pangs about “pence” and such trifles, that can, like David’s harp of old, soothe or dismiss the dark spirit brooding over the latter-day Saul. It is the Great Poet we care for, whose singing-soul mystically comprehends our unuttered thoughts of love or glory; who chants not only his pains, but ours; not his joy, so much as the whole world’s joy.