Let us first review briefly the complete and eulogistic manner in which English poets are dealt with. Then let us compare, while making all allowances for alien inferiority, this treatment of British poetry with the Encyclopædia’s treatment of the poetry of other nations. To begin with, I find but very few British poets of even minor importance who are not given a biography more than equal to their deserts. Coventry Patmore receives a biography of a column and a half. Sydney Dobell’s runs to nearly a column. Wilfred Scawen Blunt is accorded half a column; John Davidson, over a column of high praise; Henley, more than an entire page; Stephen Phillips, three-fourths of a column; Henry Clarence Kendall, eighteen lines; Roden Noel, twenty-eight lines; Alexander Smith, twenty-five lines; Lawrence Binyon, nineteen lines; Laurence Housman, twenty-three lines; Ebenezer Jones, twenty-four lines; Richard Le Gallienne, twenty lines; Henry Newbolt, fifteen lines; and Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy, twenty-nine lines. These names, together with the amount of space devoted to them, will give an indication of the thoroughness and liberality accorded British poets. But these by no means complete the list. Robert Bridges receives half a column, in which we learn that “his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision, and delicacy yet strength of expression.” And in his higher flights “he is always noble and sometimes sublime.... Spirituality informs his inspiration.” Here we have an excellent example of the Encyclopædia’s combination of the uplift and hyperbole. More of the same moral encomium is to be found in the biography of Christina Rossetti, which is a column in length. Her “sanctity” and “religious faith” are highly praised; and the article ends with the words: “All that we really need to know about her, save that she was a great saint, is that she was a great poet.” Ah, yes! Saintliness—that cardinal requisite in British æsthetics. An example of how the _Britannica’s_ provincial puritanism of judgment works against a poet is to be found in the nearly-two-page biography of Swinburne, wherein we read that “it is impossible to acquit his poetry of the charge of animalism which wars against the higher issues of the spirit.” No, Swinburne was not a pious uplifter; he did not use his art as a medium for evangelical exhortation. Consequently his work does not comply with the _Britannica’s_ parochial standard. And although Swinburne was contemporary with Francis Thompson, it is said in the latter’s two-thirds-of-a-column biography that “for glory of inspiration and natural magnificence of utterance he is unique among the poets of his time.” Watts-Dunton also, in his three-fourths-of-a-column biography, is praised lavishly and set down as a “unique figure in the world of letters.”