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 for instruction in the art. "Poetry taught in twelve
lessons." Congenital idiocy is no disqualification. Anybody can write
"poetry." It is a most unenviable distinction to leave published a thin
volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, nobody reads, nobody
cares for except the author, who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and
revels in its beauties, which he has all to himself. Come! who will be
my pupils in a Course,--Poetry taught in twelve lessons? That made a
laugh, in which most of The Teacups, myself included, joined heartily.