beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new
exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that
the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage.

Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of
opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances,
confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd
guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble
of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns
his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows the fortunes of
"Childe" Harold. Lord Tennyson usually deals with titled artists.
[Footnote: See _Lord Burleigh_, Eleanore in _A Becket_, and the Count in
_The Falcon_.] Greater significance attaches to the gentle birth of the
two prominent fictional poets of the century, Sordello and Aurora Leigh,
yet in both poems the plot interest is enough to account for it. In
Sordello's case, especially, Taurello's dramatic offer of political
leadership to his son suffices to justify Browning's choice of his
hero's rank. [Footnote: Other poems celebrating noble poets are _The
Troubadour_, Praed; _The King's Tragedy_, Rossetti; _David, Charles di
Trocca_, Cale Young Rice.]

None of these instances of aristocratic birth are of much importance,
and wherever there is a suggestion that the poet's birth represents a
tenet of the poem's maker, one finds, naturally, praise of the singer
who springs from the masses. The question of the singer's social origin
was awake in verse even before Burns. So typical an eighteenth century
poet as John Hughes, in lines _On a Print of Tom Burton, a Small Coal
Man_, moralizes on the phenomenon that genius may enter into the
breast of one quite beyond the social pale. Crabbe [Footnote: See _The
Patron_.] and Beattie,[Footnote: See _The Minstrel_.] also, seem