In the van of the recoil against Byronic morals one finds Crabbe, [Footnote: See _Edmund Shore_, _Villars_.] Praed [Footnote: See _The Talented Man_, _To Helen with Crabbe's Poetry_.] and Landor. [Footnote: See _Few Poets Beckon_, _Apology for Gebir_.] Later, when the wave of Byronic influence had time to reach America, Longfellow took up the cudgels against the evil poet. [Footnote: See his treatment of Aretino, in _Michael Angelo_.] Protest against the group of decadents who flourished in the 1890's even yet rocks the poetic waves slightly, though these men did not succeed in making the world take them as seriously as it did Byron. The cue of most present-day writers is to dismiss the professedly wicked poet lightly, as an aspirant to the laurel who is unworthy of serious consideration. A contemporary poet reflects of such would-be riders of Pegasus: There will be fools that in the name of art Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall, I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves Far, far above them. [Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. See also Richard Le Gallienne, _The Decadent to his Soul_, _Proem to the Reader in English Poems_; Joyce Kilmer, _A Ballad of New Sins_.] Poets who indignantly repudiate any and all charges against their moral natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all scandals regarding him are merely malicious fictions. In the eighteenth century this mode of passing judgment was most naively manifest in verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded, without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart, Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.]