In his recently published lecture, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Mr. de la Mare tells an amusing story by way of showing how in 1916 his reputation as a poet stood “in the great eye of America.” He went one day to pay his respects to a friend of Rupert Brooke’s in New York. “A graceful coloured lift-girl inquired who the caller was. I told her. Whereupon she exclaimed, with a smile all radiant gold and ivory, ‘Gee whiz ! What a name !’”

It is to be hoped that the poet’s diffidence made him underestimate his fame in the United States ; even Mr. Kipling could not expect to be as well known by name to a lift-attendant as the latest cinema hero : “One star differeth from another in glory,” or at least in conspicuousness. Yet it is scarcely to be disputed that something remains to be done before the readers of Mr. de la Mare’s poetry, on both sides of the Atlantic, are as numerous as they should be. The poet of Motley and The Listeners will certainly never be as popular as Miss Mary Pickford ; he would disclaim any such ambition. He will probably never be as well known even as Mr. Kipling, or the friend whom he praises so generously in the essay from which we have quoted. Nevertheless, his work ought to be, and, we hope, when his Collected Poems have made their due impression, will be much more widely read and discussed than it is at present.