But almost all original poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are subject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitations of themselves.

Every now and then in the works of the noblest classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts from an American book of parodies.

Swinburne, for example, when he wrote the couplet-- "From the lilies and languors of virtue To the raptures and roses of vice," wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial letters.

Or again, Mr.Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line-- "Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star," was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit of American humour.

This tendency is, of course, the result of the self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a _dramatis personae_ and act perpetually in character.