the more he is acquainted with the circles below it. That he must have a definite artistic bias, a "singing" faculty, or, as Mr. Locker phrases it, must " be more or less of a poet"—cela va sans dire. His next essential qualification is the gift of humour. No society can ever have existed in which youth and beauty, genius and experience, freely commingled, without the atmospheric element of humour, the incessant play of mental summer lightning, produced by the gentle collision of electrical natures. A flow of light humorous talk, rippling with banter, bubbling into jets of wit and satire, is notoriously the staple of "polite" conversation, and the brightest talkers are the most favoured guests. Lastly, and mainly for the same reason, he must be somewhat of an egotist; not only as any poet, if ever so little subjective, must be in becoming the self-conscious type of a class or race, but because the essence of polite conversation which he has to transfigure into art is never perfect unless the individuality of each participant be discernible in the amalgamated flavour of the whole.'
That Mr. Locker not only possesses all the essential qualifications indispensable in a poet of society of the first rank—whether we take his own estimate of what may be necessary or that of his reviewer—every cultivated reader knows. But widely as his 'London Lyrics' have been read, his poetry is no more likely to please as large a circle as the productions of Cowper, Pope, or Tennyson, than the verses of Prior or Praed are likely to do so.
We have spoken of Mr. Locker's verses as reflecting polish and culture in the highest degree; and, apropos of this, it is curious to note that he was almost as old a man when he began to write as Praed was when he left off writing. Though he is essentially the poet of the 'upper ten thousand,' to quote a hackneyed epithet, Mr. Locker's variety in his studies of life recommends him to all tastes.
Here is a poet, unrivalled in his particular line, who has only published verses that fill a couple of hundred pages. Would that all those other poets—true and sham—would follow his example! Yet by how few lines will any one of them be remembered by an ungrateful posterity! Tennyson said, some time since, to a friend: 'If I am remembered a hundred years hence by twenty lines I have written, I shall be a lucky man.' Mr. Locker has written twenty poems that will be remembered a hundred years hence;
