Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/59

 Rh every tone and hue and form he was "purely and intensely Asiatic." "The carping criticism of paltry tastes and limited understandings faded before that burst of admiration with which all enlightened spirits hailed the beauty and magnificence of 'Lalla Rookh.'"

Few people care to confess to "paltry tastes" and "limited understandings." They would rather join in any general acclamation. "Browning's poetry obscure!" I once heard a lecturer say with scorn. "Let us ask ourselves, 'Obscure to whom?' No doubt a great many things are obscure to long-tailed Brazilian apes." After which his audience, with one accord, admitted that it understood "Sordello." So when Jeffrey—great umpire of games whose rules he never knew—informed the British public that there was not in "Lalla Rookh" "a simile, a description, a name, a trait of history, or allusion of romance that does not indicate entire familiarity with the life, nature, and learning of the East," the public contentedly took his word for it. When he remarked that "the dazzling splendours, the breathing odours" of Araby were without doubt Moore's "native element,"