bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little
truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were
University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the
means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard
fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well-to-do, and
I challenge you that, if he had not been well-to-do, he would no more
have attained to writing "Saul" or "The Ring and the Book" than Ruskin
would have attained to writing "Modern Painters" if his father had not
dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income;
and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew
young, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by the
laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but
let us face them. It is--however dishonouring to us as a nation--certain
that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these
days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe me--and
I have spent a great part of the last ten years in watching some 320
Elementary Schools--we may prate of democracy, but actually a poor child
in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to
be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings
are born.

What do I argue from this? I argue that until we can bring more
intellectual freedom into our State, more 'joy in widest commonalty
spread,' upon you, a few favoured ones, rests an obligation to see that
the springs of English poetry do not fail. I put it to you that of this
glory of our birth and state _you_ are the temporary stewards. I put it
to the University, considered as a dispenser of intellectual light, that
to treat English poetry as though it had died with Tennyson and your
lecturers had but to compose the features of a corpse, is to abnegate
high hope for the sake of a barren convenience. I put it to the Colleges,