ne
to his grave before a dispute arose, not only concerning his parentage
(about which any man might have certified himself at the smallest
expense of time and trouble), but over an unusually pointless epigram
that was made at Cambridge many years ago, and neither on him, nor on
his father, but on an entirely different Jowett, _Semper ego auditor
tantum?_--

If a funny "Cantab" write a dozen funny rhymes,
Need a dozen "Cantabs" write about it to the _Times_?
Need they write, at any rate, a generation after,
Stating cause and date of joke and reasons for their laughter?

THE POPULAR CONCEPTION OF A POET

June 24, 1893. March 4, 1804. In what respect Remarkable.

What seems to me chiefly remarkable in the popular conception of a
Poet is its unlikeness to the truth. Misconception in this case has
been flattered, I fear, by the poets themselves:--

"The poet in a golden Clime was born,
With golden stars above;
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.
He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill;
He saw thro' his own soul.
The marvel of the Everlasting Will,
An open scroll,
Before him lay...."

I should be sorry to vex any poet's mind with my shallow wit; but this
passage always reminds me of the delusions of the respectable
Glendower:--

"At my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak'd like a coward."

--and Hotspur's interpretation (slightly petulant, to be sure), "Why,
so it would have done at the time if your mother's cat had but
kittened, though you yourself had never been born." I protest that I
reverence poetry and the poets: but at the risk of being warned off
the holy ground as a "dark-browed sophist," must declare my plain
opinion that the above account of the poet's birth and native gifts
does not consist with fact.

Yet it consents with the popular notion, which you may find presented
or implied month by month and week by week, in the reviews; and even
day by day--for it has found its way into the newspapers. Critics have
observed that considerable writers fall into two classes--

Two lines of Poetic Development.

(1) Those who start with their heads full of great thoughts, and are
from the first occupied rather with their matter than with the manner
of expressing it.

(2) Those who begin with the love of expression and intent to be
artists