pers and open in two or three places, is on the
whole of so good an average quality. The dead level of mediocrity is in
these days a table-land, a good deal above the old sea-level of laboring
incapacity. Sixty years ago verses made a local reputation, which
verses, if offered today to any of our first-class magazines, would go
straight into the waste-basket. To write "poetry" was an art and mystery
in which only a few noted men and a woman or two were experts.

When "Potter the ventriloquist," the predecessor of the well-remembered
Signor Blitz, went round giving his entertainments, there was something
unexplained, uncanny, almost awful, and beyond dispute marvellous, in
his performances. Those watches that disappeared and came back to
their owners, those endless supplies of treasures from empty hats, and
especially those crawling eggs that travelled all over the magician's
person, sent many a child home thinking that Mr. Potter must
have ghostly assistants, and raised grave doubts in the minds of
"professors," that is members of the church, whether they had not
compromised their characters by being seen at such an unhallowed
exhibition. Nowadays, a clever boy who has made a study of parlor
magic can do many of those tricks almost as well as the great sorcerer
himself. How simple it all seems when we have seen the mechanism of the
deception!

It is just so with writing in verse. It was not understood that
everybody can learn to make poetry, just as they can learn the more
difficult tricks of juggling. M. Jourdain's discovery that he had been
speaking and writing prose all his life is nothing to that of the man
who finds out in middle life, or even later, that he might have been
writing poetry all his days, if he had only known how perfectly easy and
simple it is. Not everybody, it is true, has a sufficiently good ear,
a sufficient knowledge of rhymes and capacity for handling them, to be
what is called a poet. I doubt whether more than nine out of ten, in
the average, have that combination of gifts required for the writing of
readable verse.

This last expression of opinion created a sensation among The Teacups.
They looked puzzled for a minute. One whispered to the next Teacup,
"More than nine out of ten! I should think that was a pretty liberal
allowance."

Yes, I continued; perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred would come nearer to
the mark. I have sometimes thought I might consider it worth while to
set up a school