leasant to do so, and even pleasanter to me and you if,
instead of lecturing, I quoted to you some of their best passages. But I
could not do this for five years. Sooner or later, my own words would
have to come, and the inevitable contrast. Not to sharpen it now, I will
be silent concerning them also; and will only assure you that I do not
forget them, or the greatness of the honour of succeeding them, or the
responsibility which it entails.

Since I left Oxford one change has taken place in its educational
system which may be thought to affect the Professorship of Poetry. A
School of English Language and Literature has been founded, and has
attracted a fair number of candidates. Naturally I rejoice in this
change, knowing from experience the value of these studies; and knowing
also from experience, if I may speak boldly, how idle is that dream
which flits about in Oxford and whispers that the mastering of Old
English, on the basis of Teutonic phonology, and the conquest of the
worlds opened by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Swift and Burke and twenty
more, is a business too slight and a discipline not severe enough for
undergraduates. I should be glad to lighten their labours, and, if it
should seem advisable to those who can judge, I propose to give in one
of the three Terms of the year, in addition to my statutory lecture, a
few others intended specially for those who are reading for the School
of English. I wish I could do more, but I resigned my chair in Glasgow
with a view to work of another kind, and I could not have parted from my
students there, to whom I am bound by ties of the most grateful
affection, in order to take up similar duties even in the University of
Oxford.

The charming poem with which my predecessor opened his literary career,
and his admirable contributions to poetical history and criticism, prove
that it would have been easy to him to devote his lectures to the
interpretation of particular poets and poems. I believe, however, that
he thought it better to confine himself chiefly to questions in Poetics
or Aesthetics. I can well understand his choice; but, partly because he
made it, I propose to make another, and to discuss these questions, if
at all, only as they are illustrated by particular writers and works.
Still in an inaugural lecture it is customary to take some wider
subject; and so I fear you may have to-day to lament the truth of
Addison's remark: 'There is nothing in nature so irksome