The glass houses in which the poet's accusers may reside really have nothing to do with the question. The immorality of these men is of comparatively slight significance, whereas the importance of the poet's personality is enormous, because it takes on immortality through his works. Not his contemporaries alone, but readers of his verse yet unborn have a right to call him to account for his faults. Though Swinburne muses happily over the sins of Villon, But from thy feet now death hath washed the mire, [Footnote: _A Ballad of Francois Villon._] it is difficult to see how he could seriously have advanced such a claim, inasmuch as, assuming Villon's sincerity, the reader, without recourse to a biography, may reconstruct the whole course of his moral history from his writings. Unquestionably if the poet wishes to satisfy his enemies as to the ethical worth of his poetry, he is under obligation to prove to them that as "the man of feeling" he possesses only those impulses that lead him toward righteousness. And though puritans, philosophers and philistines quarrel over technical points in their conceptions of virtue, still, if the poet is not a criminal, he should be able, by making a plain statement of his innocence, to remove the most heinous charges against him, which bind his enemies into a coalition. There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the obligation of proving that their lives are pure. But the effectiveness of their statements has been largely dissipated by the fact that their voices have been almost drowned by the clamor of a small coterie which finds its chief delight in brazenly exaggerating the vices popularly ascribed to it, then defending them as the poet's exclusive privilege. So perennially does this group flourish, and so shrill-voiced are its members in self-advertisement, that it is useless for other poets to present their case, till the claims of the ostentatiously wicked are heard. One is inclined, perhaps, to dismiss them as pseudo-poets, whose only chance at notoriety is through enunciating paradoxes. In these days when the school has shrunk to Ezra Pound and his followers, vaunting their superiority to the public, "whose virgin stupidity is untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound, _Tensone._] it is easy to dismiss the men and their verse thus lightly. But what is one to say when one encounters the decadent school in the last century, flourishing at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E. Gosse, _Life of Swinburne,_ p. 162.] What is one to say of a period wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted morality, towers above most of his contemporaries?