pew: as used, alas! to happen in days when one was young and godless,
and went to church. Nor, again, are the margins of certain poets
entrusted to man for the composing thereon of infinitely superior
rhymes on the subjects themselves have maltreated: a depraved habit,
akin to scalping. What has never been properly recognised is the
absolute value of the margin itself -- a value frequently superior to
its enclosure. In poetry the popular taste demands its margin, and
takes care to get it in ``the little verses wot they puts inside the
crackers.'' The special popularity, indeed, of lyric as opposed to
epic verse is due to this habit of feeling. A good example maybe found
in the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the
earlier remains the more popular -- because of its eloquence of
margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for
his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic
of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full
meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote
``Beowulf,'' our other English epic, grasped the great fact from the
first, so that his work is much the more popular of the two. The moral
is evident. An authority on practical book-making has stated that
``margin is a matter to be studied''; also that ``to place the print
in the centre of the paper is wrong in principle, and to be
deprecated.'' Now, if it be ``wrong in principle,'' let us push that
principle to its legitimate conclusion, and ``deprecate'' the placing
of print on any part of the paper at all. Without actually suggesting
this course to any of our living bards, when, I may ask -- when shall
that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall
give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin? How we
shall shove and jostle for large paper copies!

The Eternal Whither