For his better work in poetry Mr. Markham merits all the praise that he has received for “The Man with the Hoe,” and more. It is not likely that he is now under any illusion in the matter. He probably knows the real nature of his sudden flare of “popularity”; knows that to-morrow it will be “one with Nineveh and Tyre”; knows that its only service to him is to arrest attention of competent critics and scholars who would otherwise have overlooked him for a time. The “plaudits of the multitude” can not long be held by the poet, and are not worth holding. The multitude knows nothing of poetry and does not read it. The multitude will applaud you to-day, calumniate you to-morrow and thwack you athwart the mazzard the day after. He who builds upon the sea-sand of its favor holds possession by a precarious tenure; the wind veers and the wave Lolls out his large tongue— Licks the whole labor flat. If the great have left the humble so wise that the philosophies of the factory and the plow-tail are true; if the sentiments and the taste of the mob are so just and elevated that its judgment of poetry is infallible and its approval a precious possession; if “the masses” have more than “a thin veneering of civilization,” and are not in peace as fickle as the weather and in anger as cruel as the sea; if these victims of an absolutely universal oppression “in _all_ lands” are deep, discriminating, artistic, liberal, magnanimous—in brief, wise and good—it is difficult to see what they have to complain about. Mr. Markham, at least, is forbidden to weep for them, for he is a lover of Marcus Aurelius, of Seneca, of Epictetus. These taught, and taught truly—one from the throne of an empire, one writing at a gold table, and one in the intervals of service as a slave—the supreme value of wisdom and goodness, the vanity of power and wealth, the triviality of privation, discomfort and pain. Mr. Markham is a disciple of Jesus Christ, who from the waysides and the fields taught that poverty is not only a duty, but indispensable to salvation. So my _argumentum ad hominem_ runs thus: The objects of our poet’s fierce invective and awful threats have suffered his _protégés_ to remain rather better off than they are themselves—have appropriated and monopolized only what is not worth having. In view of this mitigating circumstance I feel justified in demanding in their behalf a lighter sentence. Let the portentous effigy of the French Revolution be forbidden to make faces at them.