Thursday, October 23rd, was the Poet Laureate's eightieth birthday. To
do honour to so interesting an event and to a man who has held so consistently the attention of the inner circle of the literary world, though not, of course, the reading public in the wider sense, was natural and becoming. Also natural and becoming was it that the event should be marked by the presentation of a clavichord—the esoteric instrument of a sister art. One has only to mention a few of the names of the two hundred subscribers to know how various an appeal Dr. Bridges makes. When Mr. Granville-Barker and Mr. Kipling, Sir J. M. Barrie and Mr. Masefield, the Bishop of Durham and Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Thomas Hardy and the Dean of Christ Church, Mr. Asquith and Professor Saintsbury, Mr. Yeats and the President of Magdalen, to take names almost at random, can agree to do honour to a poet, he clearly must make a strong appeal quali- tatively, if not quantitatively. If we were ourselves asked to say what will be the position of Dr. Bridges in our poetic literature a hundred years hence, we should say that in all probability he will be chiefly remembered as the pioneer of the new developments in our prosody— the man who first explored some of the new avenues in the sphere of harmonious words and phrases. But this is no obituary ! We hope and believe that the human as well as the material clavichord will give us their sweet- toned music for many years more.
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