rge Meredith, and Mr. Austin Dobson. Tennyson, though not
present at the banquet, was president of the Society, and Ruskin was
still alive. When Swinburne's 'Atalanta in Calydon' appeared, another
third-rate writer, James Russell Lowell, assured the world that its
author was no poet, because there was no thought in the verse. Four
years ago, at a provincial town in Italy, when one of the Italian
ministers, at the opening of some public building, said that united Italy
owed to the great English poet Swinburne a debt which it could never
forget, the inhabitants cheered vociferously. This was no idle
compliment; every one in Italy knows who Swinburne was. I will not
hazard to guess the extent of the ovation which the names of Lowell and
Lecky would receive, but I think the incident is a fair sign that English
poetry has not decayed.

In the _Daily Mail_ I saw once an interview with an inferior American
black-and-white draughtsman at Berlin. He was asked his opinion about a
splendid exhibition of old English pictures being held there, and took
occasion to say 'what the pictures demonstrate is not that the English
women of the eighteenth century were conspicuously lovely, but the
artists who painted them possessed secrets of reproduction which
posterity has failed to inherit.' I would like to reply 'Rot, rot, rot;'
but that would imply a belief in decay. I suggest to the same critic
that he should visit one of the 'International Exhibitions,' where he
will see the pictures of Mr. Charles Hazelwood Shannon. Such a stupid
view from an American is particularly amazing, because in Mr. John Singer
Sargent, we (by _we_ I mean America and ourselves) possess an artist who
is certainly the peer of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and personally I
should say a much greater painter than Reynolds. A hundred years hence,
perhaps people at Berlin (the most critical and cultivated capital in the
world) will be bending before the 'Three Daughters of Percy Wyndham,' the
'Duchess of Sutherland,' the 'Marlborough Family,' and many another
masterpiece of Mr. Sargent and Mr. Charles Shannon. The same American
critic says that our era of mediocrity will continue; so I am full of
hope. Even the existence of America does not depress me: nor do I see in
it a symptom of decay; if it produces much that is distasteful in the way
of tinned meat, it gave us Mr. John Sargent and Mr. Henry James, and it
took away from England Mr. Richard Le Gallienne.