Even Browning, though his popularity came late, found himself carried into all the nooks and corners of the reading public.

His robust and masculine morality, understood at last, or expounded by a semi-priestly class of interpreters, made him popular with those readers--and they are the majority--who love their reading to convey a moral lesson, just as Tennyson's reflection of his time's distraction between science and religion endeared them to those who found in him an answer or at least an echo to their own perplexities.

A work widely different from either of these, Fitzgerald's _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, shared and has probably exceeded their popularity for similar reasons.

Its easy pessimism and cult of pleasure, its delightful freedom from any demand for continuous thought from its readers, its appeal to the indolence and moral flaccidity which is implicit in all men, all contributed to its immense vogue; and among people who perhaps did not fully understand it but were merely lulled by its sonorousness, a knowledge of it has passed for the insignia of a love of literature and the possession of literary taste.

But after Fitzgerald--who?
What poet has commanded the ear of the reading public or even a fraction of it?
Not Swinburne certainly, partly because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a suspicion held of his moral and religious tenets, largely from material reasons quite unconnected with the quality of his work; not Morris, nor his followers; none of the so-called minor poets whom we shall notice presently--poets who have drawn the moods that have nourished their work from the decadents of France.