thus write of his art, working-men, and such men who have no time for prettinesses, and have not the privilege of being 'admitted into the best company,' should have been indifferent to poetry, and that it should have come to be reckoned among the luxuries of the wealthy and the idle."
Now, in opposition to this view of poetry, which is about as reasonable as to admire one of the fair sex for the artificial flowers in her bonnet, let me set the picture drawn by Coleridge, our own Devon poet, of his old schoolmaster. Where, in modern times at least, shall we find the music of verse more sweet, or the delicacy of expression more tender, than in the songs of the Bard of Ottery? and yet see how strongly he feels about the common sense which is needed by the poet:—
"At school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe, master. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons, and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him that poetry—even that of the loftiest, and seemingly that of the wildest, odes—had a logic of its own as severe as that of science. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.
"In our own English compositions he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. I fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming, 'Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, hoy, you mean!—Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse^s daughter, you mean!—Pierian spring? Oh, aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!' Nay, certain introductions, similes, and examples were placed by name on a list of interdiction
… "There was one custom of our master's which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, under some pretext of want of time, to accumulate till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis? and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man whose severities … neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent us to the University excellent … scholars. … Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage."—Biographia Literaria, by S. T. Coleridge, p. 7.
In addressing myself to parents in the middle classes, and, in some degree, to the instructors of their children, I feel sure that this picture of a fine schoolmaster of the old school will not be out of place, and will put more plainly before them than any
