[1] The sifting of the minor poetic writers of the eighteenth century is a task to which critical attention is now being very profitably turned. Many readers of poetry no doubt associate Richard Jago and Matthew Green, for example, in their minds as belonging to the same negligible group, whereas Jago was a poor dull fellow in verse and Green a very considerable poet indeed. [2] That is to say, Chaucer’s language as intelligible to us. Lost in it, no doubt, are associations from earlier speech. [3] These remarks, it need hardly be added, apply to part of Byron’s work only. [4] This is not to deny the quality to every poet before Tennyson, obviously. But never before had it been so salient a characteristic of a poetic style, nor has it been since. [5] Let me repeat that this is for immediate purposes of definition only. Browning’s individual mark is clear enough upon his poetry right through. [6] Frederick Tennyson. [7] Aubrey de Vere (the younger). [8] Arthur Hugh Clough. Tennyson would have avoided the repeated rhyme sounds of the first and second stanzas, and the third, given here for the sense, is below standard. [9] _Heraclitus_, by William Cory. Cory (Johnson by birth) was a very occasional poet, but when he wrote like this Tennyson himself could have done it no better, although no less an authority than Professor Gilbert Murray, in an instructive paper on verse translation, has recently complained, quite unaccountably as it seems to me, that the poem fails by reason of triviality in diction and rhythm. [10] Richard Watson Dixon. [11] Roden Noel. [12] Lord de Tabley. [13] I have not in general much use for criticism that quotes other criticism, but at this time of day any one may steal from the stores of Professor Saintsbury’s learning and wisdom, and although there is no modern critic, perhaps, so provocative as he, there is none who has left his mark so indelibly upon every subsequent judgment of English poetry. [14] Each reader may have his quarrel with my instances. But they served an argument that seemed worth pursuing. [15] This, I need not say, is a very partial definition of a decade that was not exclusively represented by the sallow genius of an Ernest Dowson and an Aubrey Beardsley.