effort is made towards that which the authority I have cited--who
would now be called old-fashioned, possibly even parochial--affirmed
to be what no good critic could deny as the poet's province, the
application of ideas to life. One might shrewdly guess, by the by,
that in such recommendation the famous writer may have overlooked the
cold-shouldering results upon an enthusiastic disciple that would be
pretty certain to follow his putting the high aim in practice, and
have forgotten the disconcerting experience of Gil Blas with the
Archbishop.

To add a few more words to what has already taken up too many, there
is a contingency liable to miscellanies of verse that I have never
seen mentioned, so far as I can remember; I mean the chance little
shocks that may be caused over a book of various character like the
present and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even
discordant, effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet
facing each other. An odd result of this has been that dramatic
anecdotes of a satirical and humorous intention (such, e.g., as
"Royal Sponsors") following verse in graver voice, have been read as
misfires because they raise the smile that they were intended to
raise, the journalist, deaf to the sudden change of key, being
unconscious that he is laughing with the author and not at him. I
admit that I did not foresee such contingencies as I ought to have
done, and that people might not perceive when the tone altered. But
the difficulties of arranging the themes in a graduated kinship of
moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost unavoidable
with efforts so diverse. I must trust for right note-catching to
those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper,
whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of
inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any