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The praise will be of a kind that may correctly be called soap; and the enterprises of a kind that may truly be described as Bubbles. II. Letters and the New Laureates In these articles I only take two or three examples of the first and fundamental fact of our time. I mean the fact that the capitalists of our community are becoming quite openly the kings of it.
Every morning is thy birthday gladdening human hearts and eyes. Every morning here we greet it, bowing lowly down before thee, Thee the Godlike, thee the changeless in thine ever-changing skies. Shadow-maker, shadow-slayer, arrowing light from clime to clime, Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their woodland rhyme.
Old Michael Drayton, whose portrait has descended to us, surmounted with an exuberant twig of bays, is vulgarly classed with the legitimate Laureates. Southey, pardonably anxious to magnify an office belittled by some of its occupants, does not scruple to rank Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton among the Laurelled:
Our literature is adorned by a few examples of acknowledged collaboration between a man and a woman, and only in very rare instances is the woman the minor contributor. But, in addition to these, there are innumerable records of men whose names stand in the foremost rank among our laureates and teachers yet whose work would have been simply impossible but for the woman in the background.
Certainly, no one of the Laureates, Cibber excepted, was so mercilessly lampooned. What Cibber suffered from the "Dunciad" Shadwell suffered from "MacFlecknoe." Incited by Dryden's example, the poets showered their missiles at him, and so perseveringly as to render him a traditional butt of satire for two or three generations. Thus Prior:
Poets are disturbing; they cannot be comfortably imitated, they are unsafe, not certainly the metal, unless you have Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and decorations; and these are but one at a time-and a quotation may remind us of a parody, to convulse the sacred dome! Established plain prose officials do better for our English. The audience moved round with heads of undertakers.
Rogers had declined, on the plea of extreme old age; but it was worthy of the great and good Queen not to overlook the Nestor of English poets. For the rest, the Queen looked for "a name bearing such distinction in the literary world as to do credit to the appointment." In the previous century the great poets had rarely been Laureates.
If I had any misgivings as to the stability of my paper canoe upon entering her for the first time, they were quickly dispelled as I passed the stately Club-house of the Laureates, which contained nearly forty shells, all of paper.
Names are there of undoubted splendor, a splendor, indeed, far more glowing than that of any subsequent monarch of the bays; but the legal title to the garland falls so far short of satisfactory demonstration, as to oblige us to dismiss the first seven Laureates with a dash of that ruthless criticism with which Niebuhr, the regicide, dispatched the seven kings of Rome.
No man of us chewed the new beef a proper number of times; he swallowed intently and reached for more. It was rather like twenty minutes for dinner at what our railway laureates call an eating house. Lew Wee shuffled in bored nonchalance between range and table. It was an old story to him.
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