R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

118 V. Sackville-Westjudgment, worthy of any one of our greatest poets in hishappiest moments', and Darwin, who had not opened avolume of verse for fifteen years, on the recommendationof Professor Ray Lankester read with enthusiasm thewhole of Keynotes by Mrs Louisa Guggenberger. The menwere generous, and they could afford to be. But theirgenerosity makes the women's lack of response all themore surprising; and to those who like to believe thatwomen can hold their own against men, all the moredistressing. Here were women, whose sisters were goingforward in other branches; here were women with theprofession of letters open to them in all respectability;encouraged, indeed, not only by the reviewers but by thevery men they had married—did not Mrs Emily Pfeiffertell Mr Japp that she regarded it as 'a duty to thememory of her husband to do all that in her lay tocultivate still further the literary gift in which he hadso firmly believed'?—yet they could produce nothingbetter than ponderous texts or verses worthy of a keepsakealbum.I am bound to add that they produced them in enormousquantities. The list of poetesses who were busy inthe 'seventies is really formidable, and justifies ProfessorSaintsbury's remark that the latter part of the nineteenthcentury was more prolific of applicants for the position ofTenth Muse than the whole earlier range of Englishliterature. Cecil Frances Alexander, Caroline Clive, ElizaCook, Isa Craig, Anne Evans, Dora Greenwell, HarrietHamilton-King, Isabella Harwood, Jean Ingelow, VioletFane, Dinah Craik, Emily Pfeiffer, Menella Bute Smedley,Louisa Shore, Augusta Webster—these are only a few ofthe names that appear in the biographies and anthologies.Professor Saintsbury, true to the masculine tradition ofgenerosity, remarks that a number of them are ' entitledto challenge a place with the masculine minorities'. This