Think not, although my aim is art, I cannot toy with empire easily. [Footnote: _Nero_.] Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote: See Helen Hunt Jackson, _The King's Singer_; E. L. Sprague, _A Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] betraying a disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." [Footnote: Walt Whitman, _Collect_.] In these days, when the idlest man of the street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of _The Lament of Tasso_ express the pacifist sentiment, No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die. It is clear that his creations are the origin of the poet's pride, yet, singularly enough, his arrogance sometimes reaches such proportions that he grows ashamed of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this attitude harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young friend is largely the theme of a poem, _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse. The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, _Lillian, How to Rhyme for Love, The Talented Man;_ Byron, _Childe Harold, Don Juan._] A few of Tennyson's characters take the same attitude.[Footnote: See Eleanor, in _Becket;_ and the Count, in _The Falcon._] Again and again Byron gives indication that his own feeling is that imputed to him by a later poet: He, from above descending, stooped to touch The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though It scarce deserved his verse. [Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._] After Byron's vogue died out, this mood slept for a time. It is only of late years that it is showing symptoms of waking. It harries Cale Young Rice: I have felt the ineffable sting Of life, though I be art's valet. I have painted the cloud and the clod, Who should have possessed the earth. [Footnote: _Limitations_.] It depressed Alan Seeger: I, who, conceived beneath another star, Had been a prince and played with life, Have been its slave, an outcast exiled far From the fair things my faith has merited. [Footnote: _Liebestod_.] It characteristically stings Ezra Pound to expletive: Great God! if we be damned to be not men but only dreams, Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at, And know we be its rulers, though but dreams. [Footnote: _Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry_.]