emselves and kings. Yet one writer
takes the trouble to declare,

Artists truly great
Are on a par with kings, nor would exchange
Their fate for that of any potentate.
[Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_.]

Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an
attitude; in his drama on Nero, he causes this poet, self-styled, to
say,

Think not, although my aim is art,
I cannot toy with empire easily.
[Footnote: _Nero_.]

Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote:
See Helen Hunt Jackson, _The King's Singer_; E. L. Sprague, _A
Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] betraying a
disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example
and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." [Footnote: Walt
Whitman, _Collect_.] In these days, when the idlest man of the
street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to
earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems
absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity
in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of _The
Lament of Tasso_ express the pacifist sentiment,

No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I
Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die.

It is clear that his creations are the origin of the poet's pride, yet,
singularly enough, his arrogance sometimes reaches such proportions that
he grows ashamed of his art as unworthy of him. Of course this attitude
harks back to Shakespeare's sonnets. The humiliation which Shakespeare
endured because his calling was despised by his aristocratic young
friend is largely the theme of a poem, _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man
from Stratford_, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Such a sense of shame
seems to be back of the dilettante artist, wherever he appears in verse.
The heroes of Byron's and Praed's poems generally refuse to take their
art seriously.[Footnote: See W. M. Praed, _Lillian, How to Rhyme for
Love, The Talented Man;_ Byron, _Childe Harold, Don Juan._] A few of
Tennyson's characters take the same attitude.[Footnote: See Eleanor, in
_Becket;_ and the Count, in _The Falcon._] Again and again Byron gives
indication that his own feeling is that imputed to him by a later poet:

He, from above descending, stooped to touch
The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as though
It scarce deserved his verse.
[Footnote: Robert Pollock, _The Course of Time._]

A