Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/204

192 The obligations to Poe are not only obvious but conscious, but there is no sign in the other cases of anything more than the former quality. They seem rather to be samples of that dreadful and slovenly receptivity which is the curse of the clever journalist in every department of his work. Thus does Lord Dufferin address Lord Lansdowne:

And so on. Then a turn of Tennyson:

And so on again. Trying, however, as is a second-rate literary mannerism at second-hand, done in one's salad days, it is as nothing compared to the solemn repetition of the same offence in a worse form in the hour of one's golden prime. There may be nothing more tiresome in any of Browning's galvanised monologues, and nothing more vapid in any of Lord Tennyson's pseudo-idyls, than these two detestable