With great boldness perhaps, but with no less deliberateness of judgment, I maintain that contemporary men and women might better spare for the living, breathing, and often very beautiful work of their contemporaries, some of the time and appreciation which they do not grudge to give over and over again, even if it be with some conscious effort, to the elaborate conceits of the seventeenth century, to the rather frigid frugalities of a Gray, the laborious melancholies of a Collins, or the cold transparencies of a Landor. No doubt justice will be done in the end, but why not do as much of it as possible at once? It is for these reasons that I beg your attention to an attempt at an appreciation of two contemporary singers, both excellent, though differing in the nature of their excellence. Their names are John Davidson and William Watson. But first it would be well to look a little closely at that word "appreciation," and to examine frankly the considerations which make up a literary judgment. I am induced to take this course after a somewhat amused survey of a series of criticisms which have been passed upon the two poets who are our immediate subject. One writer, for instance, speaks of Mr. Davidson's works as "marked from end to end by the careless fecundity of power," while the next tells us of the self-same verses that they have "the severe restraint and very deliberately willed simplicity of M. Guy de Maupassant." Careless fecundity and deliberate restraint are sufficiently irreconcilable terms to apply to the same creations. Another critic tells us of Mr. Watson that "it is of 'Collins' lonely vesper-chime' and 'the frugal note of Gray' that we think as we read the choicely worded, well-turned quatrains that succeed each other like the strong unbroken waves of a full tide," and I cannot but wonder how a full tide of strong waves can suggest anything either "frugal" or "well-chosen." It is turbid judgments such as these, and an intellectual slovenliness which is content to accept words and phrases without attaching definite notions to them, that discredit the average English criticism, when set beside the lucid Greek appreciation of Aristotle and Longinus, or of those Frenchmen like Taine or Ste. Beuve who know exactly what they look for and why they look for it. We still require a few Matthew Arnolds to drill us in the first steps in criticism. It seems almost as if we had accepted for literature the ultra-democratic maxim that every man has as much right as every other man to judge a poem--if not a good deal more right.