One portion of it presents no serious difficulty.  There is an uninterrupted canon of the Laureates running as far back as the reign of James I. Anterior, however, to that epoch, the catalogue fades away in undistinguishable darkness.  Names are there of undoubted splendor, a splendor, indeed, far more glowing than that of any subsequent monarch of the bays; but the legal title to the garland falls so far short of satisfactory demonstration, as to oblige us to dismiss the first seven Laureates with a dash of that ruthless criticism with which Niebuhr, the regicide, dispatched the seven kings of Rome.  To mark clearly the bounds between the mythical and the indubitable, a glance at the following brief of the Laureate fasti will greatly assist us, speeding us forward at once to the substance of our story.

I. The mythical period, extending from the supposititious coronation of Laureate Chaucer, in temp.  Edv.  III., 1367, to that of Laureate Jonson, in temp.  Caroli I. To this period belong,

  Geoffrey Chaucer, 1367-1400
  John Scogan, 1400-1413
  John Kay, 1465-
  Andrew Bernard, 1486-
  John Skelton, 1509-1529
  Edmund Spenser, 1590-1599
  Samuel Daniel, }
  Michael Drayton, } 1600-1630
  ben Jonson, }

II.  The DRAMATIC, extending from the latter event to the demise of Laureate SHADWELL, in temp.  Gulielmi III., 1692. Here we have

Ben Jonson,           1630-1637
will Davenant,        1637-1668
John Dryden,          1670-1689
Thomas Shadwell,      1689-1692

III.  The LYRIC, from the reign of Laureate TATE, 1693, to the demise of Laureate PYE, 1813:—­

Nahum Tate,           1693-1714
Nicholas Rowe,        1714-1718
Laurence EUSDEN,      1719-1730
Colley cibber,        1730-1757
William Whitehead,    1758-1785
Thomas Warton,        1785-1790
Henry James Pye,      1790-1813

IV.  The VOLUNTARY, from the accession of Laureate SOUTHEY, 1813, to the present day:—­

  Robert Southey, 1813-1843
  William Wordsworth, 1843-1850
  Alfred Tennyson, 1850-

Have no faith in those followers of vain traditions who assert the existence of the Laureate office as early as the thirteenth century, attached to the court of Henry III.  Poets there were before Chaucer,—­vixere fortes ante Agamemnona,—­but search Rymer from cord to clasp and you shall find no documentary evidence of any one of them wearing the leaf or receiving the stipend distinctive of the place.  Morbid credulity can go no farther back than to the “Father of English Poetry":—­