Circumstances have combined, in a very curious way, to produce this result. If a supernatural power could be conceived as planning a scenic effect, it could hardly have arranged it in a manner more telling, or more calculated to excite the popular imagination, than has been the case in the quick succession of the death of Matthew Arnold, of Robert Browning, and of Tennyson. _Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?_ _Thy shaft few thrice; and thrice our peace was slain._ A great poet was followed by a greater, and he by the greatest of the century, and all within five years. So died, but not with this crescent effect, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Raleigh; so Vanbrugh, Congreve, Gay, Steele, and Defoe; so Byron, Shelley, and Keats; so Scott, Coleridge, and Lamb. But in none of these cases was the field left so exposed as it now is in popular estimation. The deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron were really momentous to an infinitely greater degree than those of Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson, because the former were still in the prime of life, while the latter had done their work; but the general public was not aware of this, and, as is well known, Shelley and Keats passed away without exciting a ripple of popular curiosity. The tone of criticism since the death of Tennyson has been very much what might, under the circumstances, have been expected. Their efforts to overwhelm his coffin with lilies and roses have seemed paltry to the critics, unless they could succeed, at the same time, in laying waste all the smaller gardens of his neighbours. There is no doubt that the instinct for suttee lies firmly embedded in human nature, and that the glory of a dead rajah is dimly felt by us all to be imperfect unless some one or other is immolated on his funeral pile. But when we come to think calmly on this matter, it will be seen that this offering up of the live poets as a burnt sacrifice to the memory of their dead master is absurd and grotesque. We have boasted all these years that we possessed the greatest of the world's poets since Victor Hugo. We did well to boast. But he is taken from us at a great age, and we complain at once, with bitter cries--because we have no poet left so venerable or so perfect in ripeness of the long-drawn years of craftsmanship--that poetry is dead amongst us, and that all the other excellent artists in verse are worthless scribblers. This is natural, perhaps, but it is scarcely generous and not a little ridiculous. It is, moreover, exactly what the critics said in 1850, when Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson had already published a great deal of their most admirable work.