It is the fashion with that enormous class of people who don’t know what they are talking about, and who take up cuckoo-cries, to speak contemptuously of modern literature, by which they mean (for they are acquainted with little else) periodical literature.  However small may be its merits, it is at all events ten times as good as ancient periodical literature used to be.  A very much better authority than myself on such a subject has lately informed us that the majority of the old essays in the Edinburgh Review, at the very time when it was supposed to be most ‘trenchant,’ ‘masterly,’ ‘exhaustive,’ and a number of other splendid epithets, are so dull and weak and ignorant, that it is impossible that they or their congeners would now find acceptance in any periodical of repute.  And with regard to all other classes of old magazine literature, this verdict is certainly most just.

Let us take what most people suppose to be ‘the extreme case,’ Magazine Poetry.  Of course there is to-day a great deal of rant and twaddle published under the name of verse in magazines; yet I could point to scores and scores of poems that have thus appeared during the last ten years,[5] which half a century ago would have made—­and deservedly have made—­a high reputation for their authors.  Such phrases as ’universal necessity for practical exertion,’ ‘prosaic character of the age,’ etc., are, of course, common enough; but those who are acquainted with such matters will, I am sure, corroborate my assertion that there was never so much good poetry in our general literature as exists at present.  Persons of intelligence do not look for such things perhaps, and certainly not in magazines, while persons of ‘culture’ are too much occupied with old china and high art; but to humble folks, who take an interest in their fellow-creatures, it is very pleasant to observe what high thoughts, and how poetically expressed, are now to be found about our feet, and, as it were, in the literary gutter.  I don’t compare these writers with Byrons and Shelleys; I don’t speak of them as born poets at all.  On the contrary, my argument is that second nature (cultivation, opportunities of publication, etc.) has made them what they are; and it is immensely creditable to her.

[5] I take up a half-yearly volume of a magazine (price 1-1/2d. weekly) addressed to the middle classes, and find in it, at haphazard, the five following pieces, the authors of which are anonymous: 

      AGATHA.

      ’From under the shade of her simple straw hat
        She smiles at you, only a little shamefaced: 
      Her gold-tinted hair m a long-braided plait
        Reaches on either side down to her waist. 
      Her rosy complexion, a soft pink and white,
        Except where the white has been warmed by the sun,
      Is glowing with health and an eager delight,
        As she pauses to speak to you after her run.