hors le genre ennuyeux.' With regard to another point, my experience is, that if you choose remote and recondite subjects to lecture upon, nobody comes to hear you; if, on the other hand, you choose such well-worn topics as the genius of Wordsworth, or of Scott, or of Shakspere, you incur, almost of necessity, obligations to previous writers. I have endeavoured to acknowledge honestly such debts, when I was clear to whom they were owing; but of course much that I pass over in silence may be, and probably is, derived more or less, in one way or another, from older critics; I hope that for this class of obligations a general acknowledgment may suffice. I plead guilty also (the Lectures having been delivered at times often widely separated from each other) to a certain amount of repetition, but I do not repeat myself unless I consider the subject worth returning to; I have, therefore, had my manuscripts printed just as I found them. With regard to the Poems at the end of the book, I have had lately so few opportunities of spending either time or thought upon versifying, that I certainly should not have published them, had it not been that to write an ode in honour of Lord Salisbury, for the Oxford Commemoration of 1870, became my duty as Poetry Professor; indeed, it was perhaps the chief single act of my professorship. It seemed, therefore, but reasonable that I should attach this Ode to the Lectures, and, that once done, the few pieces of verse lying about in my drawers naturally followed in its wake. Two of these poems-namely, 'The Loss of the Birkenhead' and 'The Red Thread of Honour,' have appeared before in a volume of mine long since out of print. I republish these two poems here for different reasons: I republish The Loss of the Birkenhead' because, at the request of Mr. Palgrave, I made in it, to suit his excellent selection of verses for children, some slight alterations. 'The Red Thread of Honour' I republish without any alteration at all, upon quite other grounds; it has been, I understand, translated into Pushtoo, and has become a favourite among the villagers of the Northwestern frontier of India; my informant added that the tradition of 'The Red Thread' was universally known among them. I was gratified to learn this unexpected fact, I confess, partly perhaps from the vanity natural to the genus irritabile, but partly, also, because it showed that I have managed to express the strong interest I feel in any gallant barbarians who try to hold their own against the overwhelming resources of a civilised power, with some tolerable effect. Of the longest among the poems, Neamet and Noam,' I have nothing to say, except a few words in reference to its versification. The story struck me, when I happened to be more at leisure than usual, as susceptible of poetical treatment; I hesitated for some time as to the form in which I should put it, and finally decided upon the rhymed heroic of Dryden and Pope: for certain purposes this old-fashioned measure is yet unsurpassed. With regard to what we may perhaps call the serious epigram, such as that, God Or again, Lives through all life, extends through all extent, The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine, And other phrases of this kind, they cannot be expressed with the same force and terseness in any other metre that I know of. But a narrative poem, written in such strong and stinging couplets, would over-stimulate the critical palate-would remind us, in fact, of the Irishman's matchless apple pie that was to be made entirely of quince. Dryden, therefore, had recourse to triplets, to Alexandrines, and other poetical stratagems in the hope of making his verses more fluent and less monotonous. I have followed Dryden in this, I have even gone a little beyond him; Shelley, and others since his time, have thrown a new light on the capabilities of the rhymed heroic, and I have not scrupled to take the hints that they afford. Still, however, I have endeavoured, in the main, to keep to the well-known metre of 'Theodore and Honoria,' 'Palamon and Arcite,' and other such poems, belonging to the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century. Mr. Morris's rhymed decasyllables may be just as good, may be better, if you will, for a narrative poem, but they are not the same. My object has been to go on in the old groove, though I wish to make my lines as free as possible, consistently with what would, I suppose, be called in politics a liberal conservatism. Having said thus much, I have nothing more to do, except to gladly avail myself of this opportunity to express my grateful thanks to the University in general, and to the Members of my own College in particular, for the kindness with which I have been met throughout my tenure of office. ALL SOULS COLLEGE: February 10, 1877. |