"Open the old cigar-box-let me consider anew

Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you? A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke; And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke.

Light me another Cuba; I hold to my first sworn vows, If Maggie will have no rival, I'll have no Maggie for spouse!"

How does this low estimate compare with Holland's idea of women, or with Wordsworth's as expressed in "She was a Phantom of Delight," or with Dryden's "Mrs. Killigrew?"

What poet has written so much and yet has celebrated so little of all that is good and beautiful and true and noble in the sex? Certainly not Byron, or Burns, or Dryden, or Chaucer, who, notwithstanding they celebrated in needless verse much to woman's shame, nevertheless paid her virtues, her graces, her crowning glories, many beautiful tributes. We fear that the women of America at least, who are so generally, so devotedly engaged in all manner of Christian benevolence to relieve the distressed, to lessen vice, crime and misery, and to forward with a zeal that knows no flagging, with a devotion that smiles derisively at failures, every worthy enterprise that may hasten the world toward the dawning of a better day for all, will fail to discover the faintest compliment to

their sacrifices and devotion in Mr. Kipling's celebrations in ribald verse of almost solely the basest elements of their sex. One is made to wonder whether Mr. Kipling would have the readers of his songs and verse believe that the "bad Delilahs" prevail over the noble Cordelias in shaping the destinies of the sex. How the opinion that forces itself upon us contrasts with that of the distinguished essayist from whom we have already quoted: "At this moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it excels in women. A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly, let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous reformers can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature that I believe only herself can show us how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and, by the firmness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces its coarsest calculators that another road exists than that which their feet know."

But it may be objected by his admirers that the poet has put into verse simply the reasoning

of some one else and that this is not necessarily his own sentiment of women; yet, nowhere in his verse is there any indication that it is Jones or Smith that reasons thus. Moreover, this reasoning and conclusion are both very much in accord with our poet's sentiment elsewhere repeatedly expressed, as we have shown.

CHAPTER IX.

A BRIEF CHAPTER ON THE ORIGIN AND TRANSMISSION OF LOW TASTE AMONG ENGLISH

Let a man but observe himself, and he will, if I mistake not, find that, in nine cases out of ten, moral or immoral considerations, as the case may be, are the motive forces which push his intellect into action.-Tyndall.

WE

E do not mean by this caption that a taste for the low and coarse in literature is

the predominant taste among English poets. We simply mean that there has ever been, from Chaucer down to Kipling, an ever present low taste manifesting itself in a greater or less degree at different periods, a taste that need not have been perpetuated in order to transmit to succeeding generations the best fruits of genius, a taste for which biographers must often apologize and which writers of literary history must condone.

This is especially true of writers of metrical productions. The superstition of the age, impetuous and impassioned youth, a dependence upon the dissipated class of the wealthy for pecuniary assistance, the necessity of courting the favors of dissolute princes, may account in a large measure for much that is vile in English literature. But the age of superstition as such, has long since happily passed; while freedom of the press and the art of printing, and an educated appreciative reading public have together completely liberated authors from the necessity of paying unmanly court to dissipated princes and wealthy libertines. And in order to court the favors of the rich and great today and command their highest admiration, an author need not be a dissipated adventurer, given to all the debaucheries that characterized the court of Charles II. Hence, while we overlook in a measure this prince's poet laureate, young Dryden's, pandering to the corrupt sentiment of a corrupt prince and his licentious court, there is no recognized apology for such prostitution of intellect today, such self-abasement, in any civilized land beneath the sun, much less in America.

A century later Byron and Burns are conspicuous examples of poetic genius parading its own dissipation in verse. But not only was this a nat