supposed presence was their pretext for study, is habitually overlooked by their familiarity.
Again, ardent partisans will find the poetry whose beauty most delights them tainted with convictions to which they are opposed—heterodox religious dogmas, or ultra Tory or ultra Radical theories with which they have no patience: or it may even happen that some true poet shocks their respectability with what they can honestly call gross immorality.
In all these ways, and many more, men habitually stunt and adulterate their taste instead of allowing it to refresh, refine and reform their minds, even when they have started unprejudiced, and alert for discovery.
Now a still greater mass of individuals are biassed against poetry from the start. Its mere unfamiliarity appals them. Like old-fashioned servants, they keep their lives consistently downstairs in regard to it. Whether vice or virtue, it is not for the likes of them.
Their bolder brothers are ashamed to associate so fantastic a mode of speech with business-like cogitations. Rhyme is all very well in a music hall song; but what an inconceivable nuisance to a man who wishes to be undistracted! And even when not so alienated by ignorance, or the inhuman circumstances of their lives, they may alone be impressionable through some enthusiasm, and thus become exclusive readers of imperialistic or socialistic verse because they are aglow with sympathy for the poet's ideas, and remain immovable by similar or superior beauties not so associated.
In this way many folk enjoy hymns to whom all other poetry is distasteful, or are ravished by limericks who could not be tempted to open a Golden Treasury.
Again the kindling eloquence of some critic, the voice and manner of some reader, cause their taste to be passionately espoused: when the same ardent hero-worship
