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audience it now has in America. To Drake contemporary 

 English poetry meant Campbell and Scott and Byron, gentle- 

 manly poets, who had much business in the world besides writ- 

 ing. In 1816, when The Culprit Fay was composed, Keats 

 had not yet published, and Shelley had published, besides his 

 juvenilia, only Queen Mob and Alastor. Drake had before 

 him, as possible models, Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming, 

 Scott's various longer poems, Byron's Childe Harold, and his 

 oriental tales. In all of these works the scene and the plot 

 counted for more than the idea; if the poet expressed himself 

 also, as Byron certainly did, it was his personality, his mood, 

 rather than his ideas, that got expressed. The distinction may 

 not at first be evident, but we recognize in a broad way a dif- 

 ference between such poets as Milton or Shelley or Emerson 

 or Whitman, who use poetry to express their profound con- 

 victions, and those poets who write chiefly for amusement, to 

 entertain themselves or their readers, without much wish to 

 mold opinion on any subject. Drake was a poet of this second 

 kind. But even within the kind there are differences; Keats, 

 for example, loved beauty with such intensity that his worship 

 of it seems almost to be a kind of propaganda; he seems as 

 much a preacher as Shelley, though with a different subject 

 matter. Drake, obviously, had no such passion. His tem- 

 perament was somewhat like Scott's or Campbell's, perhaps 

 like Thomas Moore's ; he did not live for poetry, but he prac- 

 tised the art as an accomplishment, and had he lived, he might- 

 have raised the accomplishment to a noble importance. 



To speculate on what Drake might have written had he been 

 spared, helps us to place him in the history of our literature. 

 Fenimore Cooper was one of the friends out of whose con- 

 versation grew The Culprit Fay. The future novelist was 

 then visiting in the city, for in 1816 he had temporarily left 

 Westchester and had move his home back to Cooperstown. 

 As yet he had no thought of writing. In the famous conversa- 

 tion he and Halleck contended that the American rivers could 

 not be made the subject of romance, as the Scotch rivers had 



