Auspicious Reverence, hush all meaner song,

is one of the most pompously stupid lines in English poetry. Arnold did
not hesitate to quote instances from Shakespeare:--

Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapp'd in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons.

You would have to sacrifice Browning, because it might fairly be
concluded--well, anything might be concluded about Browning. Byron is,
of course, a mine. Arthur Hugh Clough is, perhaps, the 'flawless
numskull,' as, I think, Swinburne calls him. Tennyson surpassed

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman,

in many of his serious poems.

To travellers indeed the sea
Must always interesting be

I have heard ascribed to Wordsworth, but wrongly, I believe. I should,
of course, exclude from the collection living writers; only the select
dead would be requisitioned. They cannot retort. And the entertaining
volume would illustrate that curious artistic law--the survival of the
unfittest, of which we are only dimly beginning to realise the
significance. It is like the immortality of the invalid, now recognised
by all men of science. You see it manifested in the plethora of memoirs.
All new books not novels are about great dead men by unimportant little
living ones. When I am asked, as I have been, to write recollections of
certain 'people of importance,' as Dante says, I feel the force of that