to be conscious of an audience he is artistically damned.
You're not a Poet, I hope?"

I meekly assured him I was a mere maker of verse.

"Well," said he, "better good verse than middling poetry.
And maybe even the humblest of rhymes has its uses. Happiness is happiness,
whether it be inspired by a Rossetti sonnet or a ballad by G. R. Sims.
Let each one who has something to say, say it in the best way he can,
and abide the result. . . . After all," he went on, "what does it matter?
We are living in a pygmy day. With Tennyson and Browning
the line of great poets passed away, perhaps for ever. The world to-day
is full of little minstrels, who echo one another and who pipe away
tunefully enough. But with one exception they do not matter."

I dared to ask who was his one exception. He answered, "Myself, of course."

Here's a bit of light verse which it amused me to write to-day,
as I sat in the sun on the terrace of the Closerie de Lilas:




The Philistine and the Bohemian



She was a Philistine spick and span,
He was a bold Bohemian.
She had the ~mode~, and the last at that;