eBooks Base 2000

[Footnote: Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_.]
Stephen Phillips is unique in his disposition to ridicule such an
attitude; in his drama on Nero, he causes this poet, self-styled, to
say,
Think not, although my aim is art,
I cannot toy with empire easily.
[Footnote: _Nero_.]
Not a little American verse is taken up with this question, [Footnote:
See Helen Hunt Jackson, _The King's Singer_; E. L. Sprague, _A
Shakespeare Ode_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_.] betraying a
disposition on the part of the authors to follow Walt Whitman's example
and "take off their hats to nothing known or unknown." [Footnote: Walt
Whitman, _Collect_.] In these days, when the idlest man of the
street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to
earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems
absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity
in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of _The
Lament of Tasso_ express the pacifist sentiment,
No!--still too proud to be vindictive, I
Have pardoned princes' insults, and would die.


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