PREFATORY NOTE.

THESE biographical sketches and critical estimates of the laureates (especially in the case of Southey, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, whose genius has evoked a whole literature of analytic criticism) are necessarily fragmentary and brief, designed merely to stimulate detailed study. Such study would be fruitful of much delight as well as include a survey of many momentous historical and literary events, and furnish glimpses of a large number of famous men whose lives touched directly or remotely those of the poets laureate.

As the field is so wide, the task of making these selections from the fourteen laureates has been difficult, not only because the works of several of them are buried in out-of-the-way and forgotten places, but because in many cases the flowers of poetry have had to be plucked from a mass of coarse or noxious weeds. For this valuable aid in our work we are indebted to Miss Josie Russell, who, in the selections, has shown taste and critical judgment as well as industry. She has not attempted to give the strictly official poems of these poets laureate, but to, as far as possible, furnish examples of their lyrical genius. In cases where their official poems are representative of their genius they are of course included. A complete collection of these official odes of the laureates would be of unique value and interest, though it would exclude the work of the greatest poet among them all. After Wordsworth's acceptance of the laurel he wrote nothing official except a fine ode on the installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

The Introduction dealing with the origin and significance of the Laureateship appeared originally in The Century Magazine; and is here reproduced by kind permission of the publishers.

Statistics are not always entertaining reading, but they are essential for accuracy, and nowhere more essential than in the discussion of this subject of the Laureateship of England; as so much has been written upon it which is misleading. Many journalists, in wishing to present to the public the outlines of a "timely subject," read hurriedly a few authorities," not waiting to investigate whether these be reliable; they do not weigh

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evidence, nor stop to verify dates and facts, and the result is deplorable.

General misapprehension of the true significance of the office of the Laureateship; conflicting records as to dates; claims in regard to Chaucer, Spenser, and others which cannot be sustained; critical judgments of the individual laureates which distort the whole aspect of their official work; the repeated quotation of a spurious sonnet by Wordsworth, which, by its absurdity and atrocious lack of taste, not only reveals its inauthenticity, but, like all parody, tends to affect the influence of the genuine and magnificent products of his genius :-these are a few instances where the journalist misleads the general reader.

No detailed study of this subject can be made without reference to books which are inaccessible outside of the large libraries--many of the most essential are to be found only in the British Museum. Though they not seldom conflict with one another, the biographical dictionaries are of course very helpful; those in French and German especially so, the foreign estimate of our men of genius being often very valuable. It is to be much regretted that the excellent book by Austin and Ralph is out of print and almost impossible to be obtained. Walter Hamilton's book discusses the laureates quite fully, although it lacks orderly arrangement and is somewhat coloured by personal prejudice. Nor has it the polish of style or the dignity of treatment of Austin and Ralph. It lays so much stress upon the burlesques and the lampoons which the laureates inspired from their contemporaries, that the finer outlines of true criticism are sometimes blurred. Thus the author is not always just to Southey, and he is wholly blind to the peculiar significance and value of Wordsworth's work.

Two articles in The Atlantic Monthly of 1858 under the name of Daphnaides are stimulating and suggestive.

The greater part of that which has appeared in the magazines and newspapers since the death of Tennyson is, however, inaccurate and wholly unsuited to the dignity of the subject.

NEW YORK, 1895.

INTRODUCTION.

ORIGIN AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH LAUREATESHIP.

I.

WERE our judgment of the poets laureate of England to be based upon the current opinion of them and their work in literature, we should be inclined to consider that it was their great misfortune not only to be poets laureate, but that fate imposed upon them any compulsion to be poets at all. Since the death of Tennyson more attention has been paid to the past history and to the probable future of the English Laureateship than ever before. The explanations of the origin of this important office which have been given have, however, been conflicting, and much confusion has been thrown into the discussion. But upon one point the majority of those who have written about the poets laureate agree, and that is in sounding a note of disparagement in regard both to the office and those who have held it; if they praise at all, the praise is of such a nature as to be in itself a condemnation.

History has undoubtedly given these critics a certain basis for the severity of their remarks. The solitary office in England, to be held professedly by no one but a poet, had often been given to sycophants, time servers, and favourites of corrupt courts, who had little poetical genius to recommend them. As late as 1816 one of Robert Southey's friends advised him to rest satisfied with the safe obscurity of his predecessors. A poet laureate," he said, "is naturally a ridiculous personage; the laurel which the monarch gives has nothing in common with that bestowed by the Muses, and the warrant is of no authority in the court of Apollo." But Southey felt, and rightly too, that, though the muse of men like Tate or Eusden was indeed commonplace, that of some of the other laureates had proved herself of lofty lineage; his own muse, he said, being a dignified and high-born dame who guarded his laurels in the grove on the mountain-side where dwelt his winged horse.