But his vein was rather the
result of classical culture working on a slight original talent than
anything better, and he did not rise beyond a pleasant competence in
verse which was never that of a poetaster, but hardly ever that of a
distinct poet. In which respect he may appear here as the representative
of no scanty company dead and living. For even the longest chapter of a
book must have an end; and it is impossible to find room in it for the
discussion of the question, whether the friends of Oliver Madox Brown,
son of the famous Prae-Raphaelite painter, were or were not wrong in
seeing extraordinary promise in his boyish work; whether the sonnets of
Ernest Lefroy (1855-91) were exercises or works of art. A few more
remarks on humorous poets and women-poets must close the record.

In the art of merely or mainly humorous singing two names, those of
Edward Lear and Charles Stuart Calverley, entirely dominate the rest
among dead writers in the last part of the century. Lear, a good deal
the elder man of the two, was born in 1813, was a painter by profession,
and was the "E. L." of a well-known poem of Tennyson's. It was not till
1861 that his delightful nonsense-verses, known to his friends in
private, were first published, and they received various additions at
intervals till his death in 1888. The sheer nonsense-verse--the
_amphigouri_ as the French call it--has been tried in various countries
and at various times, but never with such success as in England, and it
has seldom, if ever, been cultivated in England with such success as by
Lear. His happy concoction of fantastic names, the easy slipping flow of
his verse, and above all, the irresistible parody of sense and pathos
that he contrived to instil into his rigmarole are unapproachable. In a
new and not in the least opprobrious sense he was "within the realms of
Nonsense absolute."

Calverley attempted less "uttermost isles" of fun. Born in 1831 of an
excellent Yorkshire family, he was educated at Harrow, and--a thing as
rare in the nineteenth as common in the seventeenth century--at both
universities, gaining at both a great reputation for scholarship,
eccentricity, and bodily strength. After some time he married and began
to work at the Bar; but an accident on the ice in 1867 brought on
concussion of the brain, though he lingered in constantly weakening
health till 1884. His _Verses and Translations_ twenty-two years earlier
had made him the model of all lite