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Rh all the difference between the amateur and the professional, the half-hearted dilettante and the serious worker. We have at last reached the point where we have to reckon with him, where we can no longer relegate him to girls and undergraduates, but must face him and what he has done on this line and on that, and consider the claims advanced in his behalf as a representative modern poet.

Those claims (let it at once be noted) are not now what they were even ten years ago. Men not devoid of the saving grace of intelligence could then be found ready to contend for a place for Tennyson above all the poets of the century. They spoke of him as the supreme mouthpiece of his epoch in the same way as Milton was, as Shakespeare was, as Chaucer was. At this hour one is at least spared the trouble of wasting time on any such vain proposition. Even the veteran survivals of the Tennysonian cult of the seventies and early eighties would now be content to accept an admission of his superiority over his contemporaries, and of an equality with Wordsworth and Byron and Keats, with Coleridge and Shelley, with Gray and Burns. These at least are the claims that will be considered here, because they are still being