considered as disciplinary bodies, that the old way of letting Coleridge
slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect
that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who
practise it the greater will be the chance of _someone's_ reaching
perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings
forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's
and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets
are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin
gowns to drape Doctors of Letters?'

In the life of Benvenuto Cellini you will find this passage worth your
pondering.--He is telling how, while giving the last touches to his
Perseus in the great square of Florence, he and his workmen inhabited a
shed built around the statue. He goes on:--

The folk kept on attaching sonnets to the posts of the door....I believe
that, on the day when I opened it for a few hours to the public, more
than twenty were nailed up, all of them overflowing with the highest
panegyrics. Afterwards, when I once more shut it off from view,
everyone brought sonnets, with Latin and Greek verses: for the
University of Pisa was then in vacation, and all the doctors and
scholars kept vying with each other who could produce the best.

I may not live to see the doctors and scholars of this University thus
employing the Long Vacation; as perhaps we shall wait some time for
another Perseus to excite them to it. But I do ask you to consider that
the Perseus was not entirely cause nor the sonnets entirely effect; that
the age when men are eager about great work is the age when great work
gets itself done; nor need it disturb us that most of the sonnets were,
likely enough, very bad ones--in Charles Lamb's phrase, very like what