After all, this is mere assertion, and what am I that I should pretend to lay down the law? If we seek, on the authority of whomsoever, to raise an infallible standard of taste, and to arrange the poets in classes, like schoolboys, then our inquiry is futile indeed, and worse than futile. But the interest which this controversy has undoubtedly called forth seems to prove that there is a side on which such questions as have been started are not unwelcome nor unworthy of careful study. It is not useless, I fancy, to remind ourselves now and then of the very high standard which literature has a right to demand from its more earnest votaries. In the hurry of life, in the glare of passing interests, we are apt to lose breadth of sympathy, and to make our own personal and temporary enjoyment of a book the criterion of its value. I may take up Selden's _Titles of Honour_, turn over a page or two, and lay it down in favour of the new number of _Punch_. I must not for this reason pledge myself to placing the comic paper of to-day in a niche above the best work of a great Elizabethan prose writer. But when a modern American says that he finds better poetry in Longfellow than in Chaucer, he is doing, to a less exaggerated degree, precisely this very thing. He feels his contemporary sympathies and limited experience soothed and entertained by the facile numbers of _Evangeline_, and he does not extract an equal amount of amusement and pleasure from _The Knight's Tale_. From one point of view it is very natural that this should be so, and a critic would be priggish indeed who should gravely reprove such a preference. The result would be, not to force the reader to Chaucer, but to drive him away from poetry altogether. The ordinary man reads what he finds gives him the pure and wholesome stimulus he needs. But if such a reader, in the pride of his heart, should take upon himself to dogmatise, and to tell us that Longfellow's poetry is better than Chaucer's, we should be obliged to remind him that there are several factors to be taken into account before he can carry us away with him on the neck of such a theory. He has to consider how long the charm of Chaucer has endured, and how short a time the world has had to make up its mind about Longfellow; he has to appreciate the relation of Chaucer to his own contemporaries, the boldness of his invasion into realms until his day unconquered, the inevitable influence of time in fretting, wasting, and blanching the surface of the masterpieces of the past. To be just, he has to consider the whirligig of literature, and to ask himself whether, in the year 2289, after successive revolutions of taste and repetitions of performance, the works of Longfellow are reasonably likely to possess the positive value which scholars, at all events, still find in those of Chaucer. Not until all these, and still more, irregularities of relative position are taken into account, can