The modern interest in the drama, and the ever-growing desire to see literature once more wedded to the stage, will, it can hardly be doubted, lead to a revival of dramatic poetry. This will not, of course, have any relation to the feeble lycean plays of the hour--spectacular romances enshrined in ambling blank verse--but will, in its form and substance alike, offer entertainment to other organs than the eye. Probably the puritanic limitations which have so long cramped the English theatre will be removed, and British plays, while remaining civilised and decent, will once more deal with the realities of life and not with its conventions. Neither the funeral baked meats of the romantic English novel, nor the spiced and potted dainties of the French stage, will satisfy our playgoers when once we have strong and sincere playwrights of our own. In religious verse something, and in philosophical verse much, remains to be done. The wider hope has scarcely found a singer yet, and the deeper speculation has been very imperfectly and empirically celebrated by our poets. Whether love, the very central fountain of poetic inspiration in the past, can yield many fresh variations, remains to be seen. That passion will, however, in all probability be treated in the future less objectively and with a less obtrusive landscape background. The school which is now expiring has carried description, the consciousness of exterior forms and colours, the drapery and upholstery of nature, to its extreme limit. The next development of poetry is likely to be very bare and direct, unembroidered, perhaps even arid, in character. It will be experimental rather than descriptive, human rather than animal. So at least we vaguely conjecture. But whatever the issue may be, we may be confident that the art will retain that poignant charm over undeveloped minds, and that exquisite fascination, which for so many successive generations have made poetry the wisest and the fairest friend of youth. _1891._ TENNYSON--AND AFTER Tennyson--and After As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what we emerged upon. Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere, the reverberations of music moaning somewhere out of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a "lady," and more insidious salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be "Tennyson's last poem."