There has been no great disposition to produce English candidates for the places of any of my original dozen. The Saturday Review thinks that I ought to have included Walter Scott, and the St. James's Gazette suggests Marlowe. There is much to be said for the claims of each of these poets, and I am surprised that no one has put in a plea for Herrick or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Of Marlowe, indeed, we can to this day write nothing better than Michael Drayton wrote:
Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That our first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear;
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.
He had the freshness and splendour of Heosphoros, the bearer of light, the kindler of morning; as the dawn-star of our drama, he ascended the heavens, in the auroral flush of youth, to announce the approaching majesty of Shakespeare. But his early death, and the unexampled character of the genius who superseded him, have for centuries obscured the name of Marlowe, which scintillated half-extinguished in the blaze of Hamlet and Othello. His reputation has, however, increased during the last generation with greater rapidity than that of any other of our elder poets, and a time may yet come when we shall have popularly isolated him from Shakespeare to such a degree as to enforce a recognition of his individual greatness. At the present moment to give him a place among the twelve might savour of affectation.
In the case of Scott, I must still be firm in positively excluding him, although his name is one of the most beloved in literature. The Waverley Novels form Scott's great claim to our reverence, and, save for the songs scattered through them, have nothing to say to us here. Scott's long narrative poems are really Waverley Novels told in easy, ambling verse, and to a great measure, I must confess, spoiled, I think, by such telling. For old memory's sake we enjoy them still,
Full sore amaz'd at the wondrous change,