. . . There’s a simple test Would serve, when people take on them to weigh The worth of poets. “Who was better, best, This, that, the other bard?” . . . End the strife By asking “Which one led a happy life?” This may answer as a criterion of a poet’s “worth,” that is, his power to fortify, to heal, to inspire; but it can hardly be accepted, without qualification, as a test of intellectual power. Goethe, to be sure, thought lightly of Byron as a thinker. But Leopardi was a thinker and a deep and exact scholar. And what of Shakespeare? What of the speeches in his plays which convey a profound conviction of the overbalance of misery in human life?—Hamlet’s soliloquy; Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle”; the Duke’s remonstrance with Claudio in “Measure for Measure,” persuading him that there was nothing in life which he need regret to lose; and the sad reflections of the King in “All’s Well that Ends Well” upon the approach of age, Let me not live after my flame lacks oil. It is the habit of present-day criticism to regard all such speeches in Shakespeare as having a merely dramatic character, true only to the feeling of the _dramatis persona_ who speaks them. It may be so; but often there is a weight of thought and emotion in these and the like passages which breaks through the platform of the theatre and gives us the truth as Shakespeare himself sees it. Browning’s admirers accord him great credit for being happy. And, indeed, he seems to take credit to himself for that same. Now we may envy a man for being happy, but we can hardly praise him for it. It is not a thing that depends on his will, but is only his good fortune. Let it be admitted that those writers do us the greater service who emphasize the hopeful view, who are lucky enough to be able to maintain that view. Still, when we consider what this world is, the placid optimism of Emerson and the robustious optimism of Browning become sometimes irritating; and we feel almost like calling for a new “Candide” and exclaim impatiently, _Il faut cultiver notre jardin_! Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be. Oh, no: the best has been: youth is the best. So answers general, if not universal, experience. Old age doubtless has its compensations, and Cicero has summed them up ingeniously. But the “De Senectute” is, at best, a whistling to keep up one’s courage. Strange cozenage! None would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain, And from the dregs of life hope to receive What the first sprightly runnings could not give. I’m tired of waiting for this chymic gold, Which fools us young and beggars us when old. Upon the whole, Matthew Arnold holds the balance more evenly than either optimist or pessimist.