rm and grandeur which
have been spoken of in that place. Nor do this charm, this grandeur,
fail to reappear (always more or less closely accompanied by the faults
just mentioned, and also by a kind of flatulent rant which is worse than
any of them) both in Dobell's war-songs, which may be said in a way to
hand the torch on from Campbell to Mr. Kipling, and in his marvellously
unequal blank verse, where the most excellent thought and phrase
alternate with sheer balderdash--a pun which (it need hardly be said)
was not spared by contemporary critics to the author of _Balder_.

Alexander Smith never rises to the heights nor strikes the distinct
notes of Dobell; but the _Life Drama_ is really on the whole better than
either _Balder_ or _The Roman_, and is full of what may be called, from
opposite points of view, happy thoughts and quaint conceits, expressed
in a stamp of verse certainly not quite original, but melodious always,
and sometimes very striking. He has not yet had his critical
resurrection, and perhaps none such will ever exalt him to a very high
prominent position. He seems to suffer from the operation of that
mysterious but very real law which decrees that undeserved popularity
shall be followed by neglect sometimes even more undeserved. But when he
does finally find his level, it will not be a very low one.

To the Spasmodics may be appended yet another list of bards who can
claim here but the notice of a sentence or a clause, though by no means
uninteresting to the student, and often very interesting indeed to the
student-lover of poetry:--the two Joneses--Ernest (1819-69), a rather
silly victim of Chartism, for which he went to prison, but a generous
person and master of a pretty twitter enough; and Ebenezer (1820-60), a
London clerk, author of _Studies of Sensation and Event_, a rather
curious link between the Cockney school of the beginning of the century
and some minor poets of our own times, but overpraised by his
rediscoverers some years ago; W. C. Bennett, a popular song-writer;
William Cory ( -1892), earlier and better known as Johnson, an Eton
master, a scholar, an admirable writer of prose and in _Ionica_ of verse
slightly effeminate but with a note in it not unworthy of one glance of
its punning title; W. C. Roscoe (1823-59), grandson of the historian, a
minor poet in the best sense of the term; William Allingham (1824-89),
sometime editor of _Fraser_, and a writer of verse from whom at one time
s