kin
would have attained to writing "Modern Painters" if his father had not
dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income;
and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew
young, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by the
laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but
let us face them. It is--however dishonouring to us as a nation--certain
that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these
days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe me--and
I have spent a great part of the last ten years in watching some 320
Elementary Schools--we may prate of democracy, but actually a poor child
in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to
be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings
are born.

What do I argue from this? I argue that until we can bring more
intellectual freedom into our State, more 'joy in widest commonalty
spread,' upon you, a few favoured ones, rests an obligation to see that
the springs of English poetry do not fail. I put it to you that of this
glory of our birth and state _you_ are the temporary stewards. I put it
to the University, considered as a dispenser of intellectual light, that
to treat English poetry as though it had died with Tennyson and your
lecturers had but to compose the features of a corpse, is to abnegate
high hope for the sake of a barren convenience. I put it to the Colleges,
considered as disciplinary bodies, that the old way of letting Coleridge
slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect
that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who
practise it the greater will be the chance of _someone's_ reaching
perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings
forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's
and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets
are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin
gowns to drape Doctors of Letters?'

In the life of Benvenuto Cellini you will find this passage worth your
pondering.--He is telling how, while giving the last touches to his
Perseus in the great square of Florence, he and his workmen inhabited a
shed built around the statue. He goes on:--

The folk kept on attaching sonnets to the posts of the door....I believe
that, on the day