his best)
verses are on the Battle of the Alma. He was a good sonneteer and an
excellent hymn-writer.

1809 contributed three writers of curiously contrasted character. One
was Professor Blackie, an eccentric and amiable man, a translator of
AEschylus, and a writer of songs of a healthy and spirited kind. The
second, Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, a poet of Parables, has never been
popular, and perhaps seldom arrived at that point of projection in which
poetical alchemy finally and successfully transmutes the rebel
materials of thought and phrase into manifest gold; but he had very high
and distinctly rare, poetical qualities. Such things as "Old Souls,"
"The Snake Charmer," "The Palmist," three capital examples of his work,
are often, and not quite wrongly, objected to in different forms of some
such a phrase as this: "Poetry that is perfect poetry ought never to
subject any tolerable intellect to the necessity of searching for its
meaning. It is not necessary that it should yield up the whole treasures
of that meaning at once, but it must carry on the face of it such a
competent quantity as will relieve the reader from postponing the poetic
enjoyment in order to solve the intellectual riddle." The truth of this
in the main, and the demurrers and exceptions to it in part, are pretty
clear; nor is this the place to state them at length. It is sufficient
to say that in Dr. Hake's verse, especially that part of it published
between 1870 and 1880 under the titles _Madeline_, _Parables and Tales_,
_New Symbols_, _Legends of the Morrow_ and _Maiden Ecstasy_, the reader
of some poetical experience will seldom fail to find satisfaction.

It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that of this poet
with Lord Houghton, earlier known to everybody as Richard Monckton
Milnes, who died in 1885. He was of the golden age of Trinity during
this century, the age of Tennyson, and throughout life he had an amiable
fancy for making the acquaintance of everybody who made any name in
literature, and of many who made none. A practical and active
politician, and a constant figure in society, he was also a very
considerable man of letters. His critical work (principally but not
wholly collected in _Monographs_) is not great in bulk but is
exceedingly good, both in substance and in style. His verse, on the
other hand, which was chiefly the produce of the years before he came to
middle life, is a little slight, and perhaps appears slighter tha