thers; and had not the Christmas holidays
happily intervened to scatter us and so reduce the perils of the
contagion, the results might have been worse even than they were.

Now, one poet in a school is bad enough; and two usually make a place
very uncomfortable for any ordinarily constituted person. But at G-- it
was not a case of one poet or even two. There were twenty of us, if
there was one, and we each of us considered our claim to the laurel
wreath paramount. Indeed, like the bards of old, we fell to the most
unseemly contentions, and hated one another as only poets can hate.

It was my tragic lot to act as hon. secretary to the "Poetry Club,"
which constituted the hospital, so to speak in which our disease worked
out its course during that melancholy term. Why they selected me, it is
not for me to inquire. Some of my friends assured me afterwards that it
was because, having no pretensions or even capacity to be a poet myself,
I was looked upon as the only impartial member of our afflicted
fraternity. No doubt they thought it a good reason. Had I known it at
the time I should have repudiated the base insinuation with scorn. For
I humbly conceived that I was a poet of the first water; and had indeed
corrected a great many mistakes in Wordsworth and other writers, and
written fifty-six or fifty-seven sonnets before ever the club was
thought of. And Stray himself, who was accounted our Laureate, had only
written thirty-four, and they averaged quite a line less than mine!

Be that as it may, I was secretary of the club, and to that circumstance
the reader is indebted for the treat to which I am about to admit him.
For in my official capacity I became custodian of not a few of the
poetical aspirations of our members; and as, after the abatement of the
disease, they none of them demanded back their handiwork--if poetry can
ever be called handiwork--these effusions have remained in my charge
ever since.

Some of them are far too sacred and tender for publication, and of
others, at this distance of time, I confess I can make nothing at all.
But there lies a batch before me which will serve as a specimen of our
talents, and can hardly hurt the feelings of any one responsible for
their production.

Our club, as I have said, was highly competitive in its operations. It
by no means contented us each to follow his own course and woo his own
muse. No, we all set our caps at the same muse and tried to cut one
ano