He stood much aloof from the contemporary literature of his day, and his letters prove that he was no fervent admirer even of Tennyson or Browning. His own poetry has been to many, as to myself, full of delightful passages, whether he wrote of the Oxford country-side, or of Wordsworth’s hills, of “the shorn and parcelled Oxus,” or of the moaning sea that Sophocles long ago heard as he heard it on Dover beach. He was our greatest modern elegiac poet; a master of the Dirge. Of the living, again, no criticism can be offered; we only note the names, and real if very various merits, of Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Watson, Mr. Davidson, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Benson, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Henley, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Stephen Philips, Mrs. Marriott Watson, Mrs. Maynell, Mr. Kipling, “a nest of singing birds.” It would be impertinent, and indeed perilous, to “draw invidious distinctions,” as the undergraduate said about the major and minor prophets: nor is it for this century to sift the poetic sheep from the goats, who, in an age that reads little poetry, are greatly guilty of much verse. The unassuming and decried art of criticism remains. Essays are of no one age; there are similar excellences in every good essayist since Montaigne. We have no Hazlitt, Lamb, or Leigh Hunt, but we had Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Pater, so unlike in all but conscious interest in style, and reminiscence of the best models. Indeed, essay writing is almost an unpractised art, as the public “has no use for it,” any more than for the letter H on the Sandwich boards. A fairly bad novelist can live; to an appallingly bad novelist the workhouse unfolds its awful valves. In literary criticism Mr. Arnold stood alone in his age, and Mr. Arnold’s literary income, it is known, surprised, when stated, the Commissioners of Income Tax: not by its affluence. Of living critics it would be in the highest degree dangerous to say a word, though many words, both of praise and dispraise, might be said of a person of reckless character. That (with obvious exceptions) most critics are men intimately familiar with what is best, from Homer to Mr. Stephen Philips, few students would venture to aver. That we (for am I not the least of all critics, and not worthy to be called a critic?) are entirely devoid of ignorance, personal bias, likes, dislikes, prejudices, pet aversions, indolence, we are not so blindly conceited as to maintain. We have been taught by many centuries of creative geniuses, from Theocritus to the latest protesting popular novelists, to know our proper place, and we take refuge in “confession and avoidance.” The new century will not know our names when we pass where Dennis and where Cibber are, unless Mr. Robert Buchanan writes a new _Dunciad_.