86
LAST WORDS
Other poets—I blush for them, Bill—may adore and repudiate in turn a
Libitina, perhaps, or Pandemos; my Venus, you know, is Laverna.
Nay, that epic of mine which begins from foundations the Bible is built on—
'Of man's first disobedience'—I've heard it attributed, dammy, to Milton.
Well, it's lucky for them that it's not worth my while, as I may say, to break spears
With the hirelings, forsooth, of the press who assert that Othello was Shakespeare's.
When he that can run, sir, may read—if he borrows the book, or goes on tick—
In my poems the bit that describes how the Hellespont joins the Propontic.
