they set upon
acquiring verse. To them it was not only (as Dr Johnson said of Greek)
'like old lace--you can never have too much of it.' They cultivated it
with a straight eye to national improvement. Among them, as a scholar
reminded us the other day, you find 'an educational system deliberately
and steadily directed towards the development of poetical talent. They
were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the Greeks, that they
were born to art and literature.... The characteristic Roman triumphs
are the triumphs of a material civilisation.' Rome's role in the world
was 'the absorption of outlying genius.' Themselves an unimaginative
race with a language not too tractable to poetry, they made great
poetry, and they made it of patient set purpose, of hard practice. I
shall revert to this and maybe amplify reasons in another lecture. For
the moment I content myself with stating the fact that no nation ever
believed in poetry so deeply as the Romans.

Perpend this then, and do not too hastily deride my plea that you should
practise verse-writing. I know most of the objections, though I may not
remember all. _Mediocribus esse poetis_, etc.--that summarises most of
them: yet of an infliction of much bad verse from you, if I am prepared
to endure it, why should anyone else complain? I say that the youth of a
University ought to practise verse-writing; and will try to bring this
home to you by an argument convincing to me, though I have never seen it
in print.

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so?
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning,
Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne--we may stop there. Of these all but
Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three Keats,
who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly
well-to-do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to
say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius
bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little
truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were
University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the
means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard
fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well-to-do, and
I challenge you that, if he had not been well-to-do, he would no more
have attained to writing "Saul" or "The Ring and the Book" than Rus