At his parents’ insistence, British poet Alfred Austin (1835 – 1913) became a lawyer (a barrister, in English terms), but the moment his father died and the young man’s inheritance was in hand, he turned his back on law and pursued his true passion: poetry. Both critics and public opinion rate Austin as a mediocre poet, at best, but it was his arrogance and penchant for trashing his more successful peers--established poets such as Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson—that made him the subject of many jokes in the literary circles of his day. Austin had the last laugh, however, as he managed to become England’s poet laureate after Tennyson died, when no other poet was willing or deemed worthy to take the position.