A determination to say as little as possible concerning writers still young in years, though already famous, will make, it may be, my summary of Victorian poetry seem inadequate to many. Mr Traill, a discerning critic, has specified some hundred or more "minor poets" who flourish to-day! But it cannot be doubted that the minor poet of our era, with his excellent technique, his deep feeling, and his high-minded impulsiveness, is separated by an immense gulf from the minor poet of an earlier period. The Pyes and the Hayleys, who were famous in an age when criticism was less of an art, had little enough of the real poetical faculty. That faculty can scarcely be denied to the hundred or more of living bards who now claim the suffrages of the poetry-loving reader. It cannot be denied also to many men who have passed away during the present era--to Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell in one period, and to Coventry Patmore and James Thomson in another. =Alexander Smith (1830-1867)= was an industrious essayist as well as a poet. Tennyson and Mrs Browning concurred in their esteem of Smith as a poet "whose works show fancy, and not imagination"; and this might with truth be said of too many of the minor bards, and, indeed, constitutes the dividing line. Sydney Yendys, under which pseudonym =Sydney Dobell (1824-1874)= co-operated with Smith in "Sonnets on the War" (1855), was a poet of similar temperament. =Coventry Patmore (1823-1896)= is known to the many through his "Angel in the House," a poem upon domestic bliss which breathed a note not always sincere, but to which Mr Ruskin assured a certain popularity through effective quotation in his "Sesame and Lilies." A certain ecstatic band of admirers attached more importance to Patmore's "Unknown Eros." These admirers spoilt him by adulation. He probably looked forward with the same keen assurance to the verdict of posterity as did Southey; and posterity it is all but certain will be as ruthless in the one case as in the other. Patmore's life was one of luxury and independence. Quite the reverse was the fate of =James Thomson (1834-1882)=, whose great poem, "The City of Dreadful Night," was published in Mr Charles Bradlaugh's _National Reformer_ in 1874, and not republished as a book until 1880. Thomson had a melancholy career which ended in drink and disaster. He died in University Hospital, London. His "City of Dreadful Night" is peculiarly a reflection of the age that is passing. It secured even during the poet's life the commendation of George Eliot, of George Meredith, and of other critics; and it may yet command a large audience, who breathe the note of pessimism which was always characteristic of the writer:--