There is less specific prejudice against "light" poetry on the part of poetical highfliers than there is against poetical rhetoric, but there is some. Once more I venture to disallow this prejudice _in toto_ as far as kind is concerned, though, of course, each individual specimen of that kind must pass its individual muster as a piece of intenser thought or feeling, expressed in appropriate language and inspired by the charm of verse-music. For that, though no one ever has defined or will define poetry, is one of the divers good approaches to a description of it. Now here, as was briefly said above, the eighteenth century possessed, for nearly the whole of its first quarter as an actual living practitioner, and for the whole of the rest of it as a past contemporary of still living persons, an unsurpassed general of light verse in Matthew Prior. On the whole I know few English poets who have so seldom had full justice done to them. No competent judge, indeed, has ever denied Prior's excellence in pure lightness, but there have been frequent failures to allow for that undercurrent of seriousness, sadness, and almost passion--that "feeling in earnest while thinking in jest," according to the best definition of humour--which characterises him. Thackeray has, indeed, equalled, but in obvious and even frank following, the great lines written (or not written) in Mézeray's _History of France_; but hardly anyone else has come near them in irony and melancholy and music, blended as three appeals in one. There is even a touch, though more than a touch would have been out of place, in the famous _Child of Quality_, and a great deal more, not quite so perfectly expressed, in the _Lines to Charles Montague_. If the touch of sadness be for the moment unwelcome, there is _Daphne and Apollo_ or the famous _English Padlock_, with a dozen or several dozen others ready to hand. And to go to yet another _nuance_, the recent discovery at Longleat of _Jinny the Just_, with its touches of sincere sorrow and the three unequalled stanzas of kindly irony: Thus still, while her morning unseen fled away, In ord'ring the linen and making the tea, That she scarce could have time for the psalms of the day-- And while after dinner the night came so soon That half she proposed very seldom was done, With twenty "God bless me's, how this day has gone!" While she read, and accounted, and paid, and abated, Ate and drank, played and worked, laughed and cried, loved and hated, _As answered the end of her being created_, especially with that last unsurpassable line; all these and many more exemplify and illustrate that indescribable raising of the expression--that making the common as if it were not common--which is the essence of poetry and the privilege of verse.