“I wonder where he is!” ... he mused, his thoughts naturally reverting to the author of the book..  “He cannot know what all London knows, or surely he would be back here like a shot!  It is six months ago now since I received his letter and that poem in manuscript from Tiflis in Armenia,—­and not another line has he sent to tell me of his whereabouts!  Curious fellow he is! ... but, by Jove, what a genius!  No wonder he has besieged Fame and taken it by storm!  I don’t remember any similar instance, except that of Byron, in which such an unprecedented reputation was made so suddenly!  And in Byron’s case it was more the domestic scandal about him than his actual merit that made him the rage, . . now the world knows literally nothing about Alwyn’s private life or character—­there’s no woman in his history that I know of—­no vice, ... he hasn’t outraged the law, upset morals, flouted at decency, or done anything that according to modern fashions ought to have made him famous—­no! ... he has simply produced a perfect poem, stately, grand, pure, and pathetic,—­and all of a sudden some secret spring in the human heart is touched, some long-closed valve opened, and lo and behold, all intellectual society is raving about him,—­his name is in everybody’s mouth, his book in every one’s hands.  I don’t altogether like his being made the subject of a ’craze’;—­experience shows me it’s a kind of thing that doesn’t last.  In fact, it can’t last.. the reaction invariably sets in.  And the English public is, of all publics, the most insane in its periodical frenzies, and the most capricious.  Now, it is all agog for a ’shilling sensational’—­then it discusses itself hoarse over a one-sided theological novel made up out of theories long ago propounded and exhaustively set forth by Voltaire, and others of his school,—­anon it revels in the gross descriptions of shameless vice depicted in an ’accurately translated’ romance of the Paris slums,—­now it writes thousands of letters to a black man, to sympathize With him because he has been called black!—­could anything be more absurd! ... it has even followed the departure of an elephant from the Zoo in weeping crowds!  However, I wish all the crazes to which it is subject were as harmless and wholesome as the one that has seized it for Alwyn’s book,—­for if true poetry were brought to the front, instead of being, as it often is, sneered at and kept in the background, we should have a chance of regaining the lost Divine Art, that, wherever it has been worthily followed, has proved the glory of the greatest nations.  And then we should not have to put up with such detestable inanities as are produced every day by persons calling themselves poets, who are scarcely fit to write mottoes for dessert crackers, . . and we might escape for good and all from the infliction of ‘magazine-verse,’ which is emphatically a positive affront to the human intelligence.  Ah me! what wretched upholders we are of Shakespeare’s standard! ...  Keats was our last splendor,—­then there is an unfilled gap, bridged in part by Tennyson.. ... and now comes Alwyn blazing abroad like a veritable meteor,—­only I believe he will do more than merely flare across the heavens,—­he promises to become a notable fixed star.”