irrelevant retort he sends.
"Your logic and your taste I both disdain,
You've quoted wrong from Jonson and Montaigne."
The shaft goes home, and somewhere in the rear
Birrell in smallest print is heard to cheer.

And yet--and yet--conviction's not complete:
There was a time when Milton walked the street,
And Shakespeare singing in a tavern dark
Would not have much impressed Sir Edward Clarke.
To be alive--ay! there's the damning thing,
For who will buy a bird that's on the wing?
Catch, kill and stuff the creature, once for all,
And he may yet adorn Sir Edward's hall;
But while he's free to go his own wild way
He's not so safe as birds of yesterday.

In fine, if I must choose--although I see
That both are wrong--Great Gosse! I'd rather be
A critic suckled in an age outworn
Than a blind horse that starves knee-deep in corn.

NOTE.--The foregoing parody, which first appeared in _The Monthly
Review_ some years ago, was an attempt to sum up and commemorate a
literary discussion of the day. On Saturday night, November 15, 1902,
at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, Sir Edward Clarke,
K.C., delivered an address on "The Glory and Decay of English
Literature in the Reign of Victoria." 'Sir Edward Clarke, who mentioned
incidentally that he lectured at the college forty years ago, said that
there was a rise from the {229} beginning of that reign to the period
1850-60, and that from the latter date there had been a very strange
and lamentable decline to the end of the reign, would he thought, be
amply demonstrated. A glorious galaxy of talent adorned the years
1850-60. There were two great poets, two great novelists, and two
great historians. The two great poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert
Browning. The first named would always stand at the head of the
literature of the Victorian period. There was no poet in the whole
course of our history whose works were more likely to live as a
complete whole than he, and there was not a line which his friends
would wish to see blotted out. Robert Browning was a poet of strange
inequality and of extraordinary and fantastic methods in his
composition. However much one could enjoy some of his works, one could
only hope that two-thirds of them would be as promptly as possible
forgotten--not, however, from any moral objection to what he wrote. He
was the Carlyle of poetry. By his Lives of Schiller and Sterling,
Carlyle showed