] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_.] Boccaccio,
Walter Map, [Footnote: See _A Becket_, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See
_Milton_, Bulwer Lytton; _Milton_, George Meredith.]--and these, he must
admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the poet-
politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to
celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a
protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look
to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as
following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all,
for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing
Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist
is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the
citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations.
[Footnote: See _William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama,
Richard Garnett.]
If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he
may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will
vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness.
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