IRatuve IRotes : 
tlbe Selbofne Society’s flDaoasinc. 
No. 74. FEBRUARY, 1896. Vol. VII. 
THE NEW LAUREATE. 
FTER a long period of waiting — a period, so we are led 
to believe, of heart-burnings and anxieties among the 
rival claimants to the throne left vacant by the death 
of Tennyson — we have once more a Poet Laureate. 
After Wordsworth and Tennyson, appointed for their literary 
merits, we have the political promotion of Mr. Alfred Austin ; 
an appointment hailed with satisfaction, so far as we have seen, 
by only one organ in the press, and that, one which can hardly 
be credited with impartiality. But it was at any rate natural, 
if wanting in decorum, that a leader-writer in the Standard should 
congratulate his fellow-scribe upon the laurel crown which has 
been conferred upon him by the political party which has received 
and, we presume, profited by his services. 
“ Not a great poet, unquestionably not a poet of the first rank, 
all but unquestionably not a poet of the second rank, and pro- 
bably — though no contemporary perhaps can settle that — not 
even at the head of poets of the third rank, among whom he 
must ultimately take his place.” In these words, twenty-five 
years since, this second Alfred — whose name at once challenges 
a comparison, which Punch has not been slow to emphasize, with 
his great predecessor — published his estimate of Tennyson. If 
that estimate were accurate, and if Alfred Tennyson ranks 
among the third-rate poets, where shall we place the present 
Laureate ? It must not, moreover, be forgotten, that many see 
in Mr. Austin’s verse an echo or faint reproduction of Tennyson 
— thus one of his critics writes : — 
[I] find in you the ‘ Tennysonian note,’ 
Diluted, small, occasionally lame, 
But very good — for a suburban throat. 
