But even thus the discussion is vain and empty. What we have to deal with is the work and not the man. So long as we all feel that there is some quality of charm, vigour, and brightness which exists in Pope and is absent in Eusden, is discoverable in a tragedy of Shakespeare and is wanting in a transpontine melodrama, so long, whether we call this quality by the good old name of genius, or explain it away in the jargon of some new-fangled sociography, we shall have basis enough for the conduct of our particular inquiry. Perhaps I may now be permitted to recapitulate the list of a dozen English poets whom I ventured to quote as the manifest immortals of our British Parnassus. They are Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. It will be noticed that there are thirteen names here, and my reviewers have not failed to remind me that it is notoriously difficult to count the stars. The fact is that Gray, the real thirteenth, was an after-thought; and I will admit that, although Gray is the author of what is perhaps the most imposing single short poem in the language, and although he has charm, skill, and distinction to a marvellous degree, his originality, his force of production, were so rigidly limited that he may scarcely be admitted to the first rank. When he published his collected poems Gray confessed himself "but a shrimp of an author," and conjectured that the book would be mistaken for "the works of a flea or a pismire." No doubt the explosive force which eggs a very great writer on to constant expression was lacking in the case of Gray, and I yield him--a tender babe, and the only one of my interesting family which I will consent to throw to the wolves. The rest are inviolable, and I will defend them to the last; but I can only put a lance in rest here for two of them. The absence of a truly catholic taste, and the survival of an exclusive devotion to the romantic ideals of the early part of the present century, must, I suppose, be the cause of a tendency, on the part of some of those who have replied to me, to question the right of Dryden and Pope to appear on my list of great poets. It appears that Dryden is very poorly thought of at Crawfordsville, Indiana, and even at busier centres of American taste he is reported as being not much of a power. "Dryden is not read in America," says one of my critics, with jaunty confidence. They say that we in England are sometimes harsh in our estimates of America; but I confess I do not know the Englishman bold enough to have charged America with the shocking want of taste which these children of her own have so lightly volunteered to attribute to her. Dryden not read in America! It makes one wonder what is read. Probably Miss Amélie Rives?