esy to show it to me
before it was delivered, instead of my having to wait till it was printed
and buy it in a shop, because I might have induced him to repair the more
serious errors and omissions in his work. For really, when you come to
analyse the lecture, what thin and bodyless stuff it is. Let me at once pay
tribute to my colleague's scholarship and learning, to the variety of his
citations. But, after all, anyone can buy a Quotation Dictionary and quote
bits out of SWINBURNE. That surely--(see FREIDRICH'S _Crime and Quotation_,
pp. 246-9)--is not the whole task of a Professor of Poetry.

Such a man, if he is to earn his pay, must be able--

(_a_) to show how poetry is written;

(_b_) to write poetry;

and it is no good his attempting (_a_) in the absence of (_b_). It is no
good teaching a man to slope arms if you are unable to slope arms yourself,
because a moment will come when he says, "Well, how the dickens _do_ you
slope them?" It is no good professing lawn-tennis and saying, "Top-spin is
imparted by drawing the racquet up and over," and so on, if, when you try
to impart top-spin yourself, the ball disappears on to the District
Railway. Still less is it useful if you deliver a long address to the
student, saying, "H.L. DOHERTY was a good player, and so was RENSHAW, and I
well remember the game between MCLOUGHLIN and WILDING, because WILDING hit
the ball over the net more often than MCLOUGHLIN did."

Those students who have attended my lectures more regularly than others--
and I am sorry there are not more of them--will do me the justice to
remember that I have put forward no theory of writing which I was not
prepared to illustrate in practice from my own work. My colleague, so far
as I can discover, makes one single attempt at practical assistance; and
even that is a minor plagiarism from one of my own lectures. He makes a
good deal of play with what he calls the principle and influence of the
Italian Canzone, which simply means having a lot of ten-syllable lines and
a few six-syllable ones. Students will remember that in our second lecture
we wrote a poem on that principle, which finished:--

Toroodle--umti--oodle--umti--knife (or strife)
Where have they put my hat?

That lecture was prepared on May 27th; my colleague's lecture was delivered
on June 5th. It is clear to me that in the interval--by what discreditable
means I know not--he obtained access to my manuscript and borrowed the
idea,