few choice minds,—of the judicious, in short. Here, again, the judicious are wrong, the masses are right. The only permanent additions to English literature which Dr. Mackay has made are the very songs which he despises. Mr. Palgrave says, in his preface to "The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics," "The editor trusts he may add without egotism that he has found the vague general verdict of popular fame more just than those have thought who, with too severe a criticism, would confine judgments on poetry to the selected few of many generations." That treasure-trove to Shakespearean scholars, the recently-discovered "Return from Parnassus," has pretty well established the fact that Shakespeare in his own day was the delight of the groundlings and the scorn of the judicious. Macaulay has shown us how the tinker Bunyan was for generations despised by the learned and cherished only by the unlearned. Many of the greatest poets—Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Walt Whitman (the list might be almost indefinitely extended)—have found the majority of the judicious arrayed against them. In our country to-day, some of the most vital and vigorous verses are written by poets to whom the judicious are inclined to deny even the name of poet, yet whom the public has taken to its heart,—Will Carleton and Ella Wheeler.
There is no question upon which the judicious are so thoroughly agreed as that the interest which the general public feel in the private lives of great men is vulgar, wrong, and disgraceful. That people who, perhaps, have never read a line of an author's works should stand agape to discover whether he parted his hair at the side or in the middle, whether he maltreated his wife, whether he got intoxicated, seems to be the height of folly. Tennyson's famous lines spring to the mind at once:
For now the Poet cannot die
Nor leave his music as of old,
But round him ere he scarce be cold
Begins the scandal and the cry:
"Proclaim the faults he would not show:
Break lock and seal: betray the trust:
Keep nothing sacred: 'tis but just
The many-headed beast should know."
Ah, shameless! for he did but sing
A song that pleased us from its worth;
No public life was his on earth,
No blazoned statesman he, nor king.
He gave the people of his best:
His worst he kept, his best he gave.
My Shakespeare's curse on clown and knave
Who will not let his ashes rest!
A splendid piece of invective, truly, hot with the awful wrath of the just man. Yet what, after all, if the clown and knave be tight? What if the interests of the race are subserved by this vulgar curiosity, even if it be at the expense of the individual great man? If so, the interests of the race are paramount. "For," to quote Tennyson against himself,—
"The individual withers, hut the race is more and more."
