and kindred subjects, as they habitually did, to more specific and local interests for their inspiration, they became, in a sense that no group of masters had been before, occasional poets. It was fortunate that they brought to their office as such the best of their qualities, and did not reserve these alone for the inspirations more accredited by tradition, so that occasional poetry, in the Victorian age, very often became great poetry. In reading the poetry of no other age do we so often feel that a poet of first-rate endowment has, as it were, been hunting about for a subject. Occasional poetry conceived and carried out in the great manner had hitherto been almost wholly confined to personal addresses of compliment or condolence, and fustian as these mostly were there had been very noble exceptions. But with the Victorians the occasions were unconfined, and any one of the poets might at any moment produce a memorable poem, as it seemed, upon something that might catch his eye in the morning paper. If, by way of illustration, we were to take the titles of a hundred of Donne’s poems and set them beside the titles of a hundred of Browning’s, we should find that in external range the one would be, as it were, a small green isle and the other a very archipelago. I need not labour the point that this does not at all suggest that Browning was a greater poet than Donne; it merely emphasises the fact that Browning’s age was far less concentrated in its poetic attentions than was Donne’s. The result of which was that Victorian poetry, with all its great central merits, all its loyal assertation of the eternal elements, acquired a certain scattered character, a certain disorder in bulk, that leaves the essential spirit of this age a little more than commonly difficult to come at.