Why is it possible to consider Mr. Meredith--whose total yield of verse has been so scanty and the most of it so 'harsh and crabbed,' as not only 'dull fools' suppose--beside the great poets who have been his contemporaries, and to feel no impropriety in the comparison? That was the question X and I found ourselves discussing, ten minutes later. "Because," maintained X, "you feel at once that with Meredith you have hold of a man. You know--as surely, for example, as while you are listening to Handel--that the stuff is masculine, and great at that." "That is not all the secret," I maintained, "although it gets near to the secret. Why is it possible to consider Coleridge alongside of Wordsworth and Byron, yet feel no impropriety? Coleridge's yield of verse was ridiculously scanty beside theirs, and a deal more sensuous than Wordsworth's, at any rate, and yet more manly, in a sense, than Byron's, which again was thoroughly manly within the range of emotion? Why? Because Coleridge and Meredith both have a philosophy of life: and he who has a philosophy of life may write little or much; may on the one hand write _Christabel_ and leave it unfinished and decline upon opium; or may, on the other hand, be a Browning or a Meredith, and 'keep up his end' (as the saying is) nobly to the last, and vex us all the while with his asperities; and yet in both cases be as certainly a masculine poet. Poetry (as I have been contending all my life) has one right background and one only: and that background is philosophy. You say, Coleridge and Meredith are masculine. I ask, Why are they masculine? The answer is, They have philosophy." "You are on the old tack again: the old 'to katholoy'!" "Yes, and am going to hold upon it until we fetch land, so you may e'en fill another pipe and play the interlocutor. . . . You remember my once asking why our Jingo poets write such rotten poetry (for that their stuff is rotten we agreed). The reason is, they are engaged in mistaking the part for the whole, and that part a non-essential one; they are setting up the present potency of Great Britain as a triumphant and insolent exception to laws which (if we believe in any gods better than anarchy and chaos) extend at least over all human conduct and may even regulate 'the most ancient heavens.' You may remember my expressed contempt for a recent poem which lauded Henry VIII because--" "'He was lustful, he was vengeful, he was hot and hard and proud; But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.' "--A worse error, to my mind, than Froude's, who merely idolised him for chastising the clergy. Well, after our discussion, I asked myself this question: 'Why do we not as a great Empire-making people, ruling the world for its good, assassinate the men who oppose us?' We do not; the idea revolts us. But why does it revolt us?