Where in the spring-time leaves are wet,
Oh, lay my love beneath the shades,
Where men remember to forget,
And are forgot in Hades.

But I have given enough examples for what would form Part I. of the English anthology. Part II. would consist of really bad verses from really great poetry.

Auspicious Reverence, hush all meaner song,

is one of the most pompously stupid lines in English poetry. Arnold did not hesitate to quote instances from Shakespeare:—

Till that Bellona’s bridegroom, lapp’d in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons.

You would have to sacrifice Browning, because it might fairly be concluded—well, anything might be concluded about Browning. Byron is, of course, a mine. Arthur Hugh Clough is, perhaps, the ‘flawless numskull,’ as, I think, Swinburne calls him. Tennyson surpassed

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman,

in many of his serious poems.

To travellers indeed the sea
Must always interesting be

I have heard ascribed to Wordsworth, but wrongly, I believe. I should, of course, exclude from the collection living writers; only the select dead would be requisitioned. They cannot retort. And the entertaining volume would illustrate that curious artistic law—the survival of the unfittest, of which we are only dimly beginning to realise the significance. It is like the immortality of the invalid, now recognised by all men of science. You see it manifested in the plethora of memoirs. All new books not novels are about great dead men by unimportant little living ones. When I am asked, as I have been, to write recollections of certain ‘people of importance,’ as Dante says, I feel the force of that law very keenly.