Of the one perhaps Byron is the type, the exemplars being such poets as those of the Mrs. Hemans school in England, and of the Longfellow school in America. Of the other class of poets, the class typified by Milton, the most notable exemplars are Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Wordsworth partakes of the qualities of both classes. The methods of the first of these two groups are so cheap—they are so based on the wide severance between the popular taste and the poetic temper (which, though in earlier times it inspired the people, is now confined to the few)—that one may say of the first group that their success in finding and holding an audience is almost damnatory to them as poets. As compared with the poets of Greece, however, both groups may be said to have secured only a partial success in poetry; for not only Æschylus and Sophocles, but Homer too, are as satisfying in the matter of noble words as though they had never tried to win that popular success which was their goal. In this respect—as being, I mean, the compeer of the great poets of Greece—Shakespeare takes his peculiar place in English poetry. Of all poets he is the most popular, and yet in his use of the “sieve for noble words” his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. His felicities of diction in the great passages seem little short of miraculous, and they are so many that it is easy to understand why he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That he was _not_ an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ with the play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603 with the ‘Hamlet’ of 1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. If we take into account, moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we now possess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and that most likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall come to the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dante’s sieve than Shakespeare. Next to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace sense of a commonplace public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time no one has met with anything like Tennyson’s success in effecting a reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.