If I dispraise Tagore now I can only say that I was among the first to praise him before he became a popular fad. The decadence of Tagore may be measured. His first translations were revised by W. B. Yeats; later translations by Evelyn Underhill, facilis et perfacilis descensus, and now they say he has taken to writing in English, a language for which he has no special talent. If his first drafts contained such clichés as “sunshine in my soul”, he was at least conscious at that time of his defects. Praise was rightly given to his first poems because it was demonstrated and demonstrable that they were well done in Bengali, i. e. that they were written in a precise and objective language, and in a metric full of interest and variety. The popular megaphone took up phrases made to define the originals and applied them to the translations. Imagine a criticism of Herrick and Campion applied to a French or German prose translation of these poets, however excellent as a translation in prose! As the vulgarizer hates any form of literary excellence, he was well content with obscuring the real grounds for praise. The unimportant element, that which has made Tagore the prey of religiose nincompoops, might easily have passed without comment. However, it has proved the baccillus of decay. Sir Rabindranath having been raised in a country where the author need not defend himself against blandishment ... I mean the force of the babu press is scarcely enough to turn anyone’s head or his judgement.... Sir Rabindranath is not particularly culpable. His disciples may bear the blame as best they may; along with his publishers. But no old established publishing house cares a damn about literature; and once Tagore had become a commercial property, they could scarcely be expected to care for his literary integrity. He might still wash and be clean; that is to say there is still time for him to suppress about three fourths of the stuff he has published in English, and retain some sort of literary position. Another man who stands in peril is Edgar Masters. He did a good job in _The Spoon River Anthology_. What is good in it is good in common with like things in the Greek anthology, Villon and Crabbe: plus Masters’s sense of real people. The work as a whole needs rewriting. The difference between a fine poem and a mediocre one is often only the fact that the good poet could force himself to rewrite. “No appearance of labour?” No, there need be no appearance of labour. I have seen too many early drafts of known and accepted poems not to know the difference between a draft and the final work. Masters must go back and take the gobbetts of magazine cliché out of his later work; he must spend more time on _Spoon River_ if he wants his stuff to last as Crabbe’s _Borough_ has lasted. There is a great gulph between a “successful” book and a book that endures; that endures even a couple of centuries.