l
tree or monolith whenever the calculation comes up; so you invent a
formula, and you cast that formula into _verse_ for the simple reason
that verse, with its tags, alliterations, beat of syllables, jingle of
rhymes (however your tribe has chosen to invent it), has a knack, not
possessed by prose, of sticking in your head. You do not say, 'Quick thy
tablets, memory! Let me see--January has 31 days, February 28 days, March
31 days, April 30 days.' You invent a verse:--

Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November...

Nay, it has been whispered to me, Gentlemen, that in this University some
such process of memorising in verse has been applied by bold bad
irreverently-minded men even to the "Evidences" of our cherished Paley.

This, you will say, is mere verse, and not yet within measurable distance
of poetry. But wait! The men who said the more memorable things, or sang
them--the men who recounted deeds and genealogies of heroes, plagues and
famines, assassinations, escapes from captivity, wanderings and conquests
of the clan, all the 'old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long
ago'--the men who sang these things for their living, for a supper, a
bed in the great hall, and something in their wallet to carry them on to
the next lordship--these were gentlemen, scops, bards, minstrels (call
them how you will), a professional class who had great need of a full
repertory in a land swarming with petty chieftains, and to adapt their
strains to the particular hall of entertainment. It would never do, for
example, to flatter the prowess of the Billings in the house of the
Hoppings, their hereditary foes, or to bore the Wokings (who lived where
the crematorium now is) with the complicated genealogy of the Tootings:
for this would have been to miss that appropriateness which I preached
to you in my second lecture as a preliminary rule of good writing. Nay,
when the Billings intermarried with the Tootings--when the Billings took
to cooing, so to speak--a hasty blend of excerpts would be required for
the "Epithalamium." So it was all a highly difficult business, needing
adaptability, a quick wit, a goodly stock of songs, a retentive memory
and every artifice to assist it. Take "Widsith," for example, the
'far-travelled man.' He begins:--

Widsith spake: he unlocked his word-hoard.

So he had a hoard of words, you see: and he must have needed them, for he
goes on:--

Forthon ic maeg singan and s