saith Wordsworth. We poets in our youth also begin in sincerity and with a single eye to the glory of the Muses. But too frequently, even while our youth is still with us, we begin to think about the glory of ourselves, and take steps accordingly. It is good for us, if we have any gift at all, to organize and advertise a school, with ourselves carefully elected by ourselves to the position of archpriest. The critic who in an idle hour set down “Cockney School,” has a great deal to answer for. Somebody followed him hard with the “Lake School.” And in due course we had the “Fleshly School.” It is to be noted, however, that these epithets were bestowed by the critics upon the poets, and not by the poets upon the poets themselves. I venture to suggest that it has been slightly different in the case of Mr. Yeats and his following. In Mr. Yeats’s mind—perhaps without his being wholly alive to it—something like the following has taken place: “To be of any account in this world a poet must have a quality or cry of his own. There is a quality, or poignancy of individualism, about Blake which has not yet become obvious to the multitude. I admire it, and I can imitate it, and possibly improve upon it; therefore let me adopt it for my own. And as I am an Irishman I shall cause it to be known not as the spirit of Blake, but as the Keltic quality. Selah!” I do not suggest for a moment that Mr. Yeats’s conduct in this matter has been either wicked or unjustifiable. I do not even suggest that Mr. Yeats has been quite aware of what he was doing; but not to put too fine a point upon it, I do say that he has been “modern,” and that it is a thousand pities. There is nothing in Ireland, and there never has been anything in Ireland which will justify the appropriation of Blake as a sort of exclusive Irish product; and Mr. Yeats has written nothing which he could not have written just as well had he been a Cockney, or a Hebrew, capable of appreciating the spiritual and technical parts of Blake, and of perceiving the beauty of certain scraps of Irish history and folk-lore. As an Irish poet, Mr. Yeats, in my opinion, fails completely. It is as reasonable to call him an Irish poet as it would be to call Milton a Hebrew poet because he wrote “Paradise Lost,” or Mr. Swinburne a Greek poet because he wrote “Atalanta.” There is not an Irishman, _qua_ Irishman, who wants Mr. Yeats; any more than there is an Irishman, _qua_ Irishman, who wants Mr. Yeats’s Irish Literary Theater. Mr. Yeats’s poetry and Mr. Yeats’s Irish Literary Theater are Blake’s poetry and Blake’s Literary Theater. They belong to the Euston Road, and not to Tara; they are cultivated, wary, wistful, minor English, and not Irish at all. You have to be English, and a trifle subtle at that, to get on with them. Blake’s laurels are very posthumous and recent because the Englishmen of his time were busy with Pope and Crabbe, and had a sort of suspicion that Wordsworth was a lunatic. Englishmen did not know even