Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds.  You throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, and by and by it turns up again somewhere uninjured, with all the pure fire lambent in its facets.  No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of fashion, and never thrown back again to light.  But the quantity of excellent verse produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very fairly within the same proportions.  The verse-market is never really glutted, and while popular masses of what Robert Browning calls “deciduous trash” survive their own generation, only to be carted away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually pushes its path up silently into fame.

These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing with the small volume of 116 pages called Ionica, long ago ushered into the world so silently that its publication did not cause a single ripple on the sea of literature.  Gradually this book has become first a rarity and then a famous possession, so that at the present moment there is perhaps no volume of recent English verse so diminutive which commands so high a price among collectors.  When the library of Mr. Henry Bradshaw was dispersed in November 1886, book-buyers thought that they had a chance of securing this treasure at a reasonable price, for it was known that the late Librarian of Cambridge University, an old friend of the author, had no fewer than three copies.  But at the sale two of these copies went for three pounds fifteen and three pounds ten, respectively, and the third was knocked down for a guinea, because it was discovered to lack the title-page and the index. (I do not myself think it right to encourage the sale of imperfect books, and would not have spent half a crown on the rarest of volumes if I could not have the title-page.  But this is only an aside, and does not interfere with the value of Ionica.)

The little book has no name on the title-page, but it is known that the author was Mr. William Johnson, formerly a master at Eton and a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.  It is understood that this gentleman was born about 1823, and died in 1892.  On coming into property, as I have heard, in the west of England, he took the name of Cory, So that he is doubly concealed as a poet, the anonymous-pseudonymous.  As Mr. William Cory he wrote history, but there is but slight trace there of the author of Ionica.  In face of the extreme rarity of his early book, friends urged upon Mr. Cory its republication, and he consented.  Probably he would have done well to refuse, for the book is rather delicate and exquisite than forcible, and to reprint it was to draw public attention to its inequality.  Perhaps I speak with the narrow-mindedness of the collector who possesses a treasure; but I think the appreciators of Ionica will always be few in number, and it seems good for those few to have some difficulties thrown in the way of their delights.