How fragrant of Victorian rule
Are these forgotten pages!
When meat and fruit were still uncanned;
When good CHARLES DICKENS still was writing;
And SWINBURNE'S poetry was banned
As rather too exciting.

No murmurs of impending strife
Were heard, no dark suggestions hinted;
Our novelists still looked on life
Through spectacles rose-tinted;
And Paris, in those giddy years,
Still laughed at OFFENBACH and SCHNEIDER,
Blind to the doom of blood and tears,
With none to warn or guide her.

The index and the authors' names,
Their stories and their lucubrations,
Recall old literary aims
And faded reputations;
We wonder at the influence
That SALA'S florid periods had on
His fellows, and the vogue immense
Of versatile Miss BRADDON.

And yet I read _Aurora Floyd_
In youth with rapture quite unholy--
Not in the way that I enjoyed
Mince-pies or roly-poly;
While "G.A.S." appeared to me