which is as much, if not as widely, admired now as when it was first published.  We think as highly too of “The Deserted Village,” the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” and the “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” as our fathers did.  And men now think much more highly of the merits of Shakspeare than they have at any period since he lived; so that after all there is an element in true poetry which does not lose by time.  In another hundred years, the verdicts of critics as to the greater part of the poems of Tennyson, Wordsworth, Browning, and Longfellow, may be very different from what they now are, while some of their lyrics may be, as they are now, pronounced immortal.

Poetry is both an inspiration and an art.  The greater part of that which is now produced is made, not born.  Those daintily musical and elaborate measures which are now the fashion, because they claim novelty, or reproduce the quaintness of an art so old as to be practically new, perhaps will soon again be forgotten or derided.  What is simple, natural, appealing to the heart rather than to the head, may last when more pretentious poetry shall have passed away.  Neither criticism nor contemporary popularity can decide such questions.

Scott himself seemed to take a true view.  In a letter to Miss Seward, he said:—­

“The immortality of poetry is not so firm a point in my creed as the immortality of the soul.”

                  ’I’ve lived too long,
     And seen the death of much immortal song.’

“Nay, those that have really attained their literary immortality have gained it under very hard conditions.  To some it has not attached till after death.  To others it has been the means of lauding personal vices and follies which had otherwise been unremembered in their epitaphs; and all enjoy the same immortality under a condition similar to that of Noureddin in an Eastern tale.  Noureddin, you remember, was to enjoy the gift of immortality, but with this qualification,—­that he was subjected to long naps of forty, fifty, or a hundred years at a time.  Even so Homer and Virgil slumbered through whole centuries.  Shakspeare himself enjoyed undisturbed sleep from the age of Charles I., until Garrick waked him.  Dryden’s fame has nodded; that of Pope begins to be drowsy; Chaucer is as sound as a top, and Spenser is snoring in the midst of his commentators.  Milton, indeed, is quite awake; but, observe, he was at his very outset refreshed with a nap of half-a-century; and in the midst of all this we sons of degeneracy talk of immortality!  Let me please my own generation, and let those who come after us judge of their facts and my performances as they please; the anticipation of their neglect or censure will affect me very little.”