influence on English letters which is at present lacking, and the lack of which drives many to call, from time to time, for the institution in this country of something corresponding to the French Academy.  I need only cite the examples of the Royal Society and the Marylebone Cricket Club to show that to create an authority in this manner is consonant with our national practice.  We should have that centre of correct information, correct judgment, correct taste—­that intellectual metropolis, in short—­which is the surest check upon provinciality in literature; we should have a standard of English scholarship and an authoritative dictionary of the English language; and at the same time we should escape all that business of the green coat and palm branches which has at times exposed the French Academy to much vulgar intrigue.

Also, I may add, we should have the books.  Where now is the great edition of Bunyan, of Defoe, of Gibbon?  The Oxford Press did once publish an edition of Gibbon, worthy enough as far as type and paper could make it worthy.  But this is only to be found in second-hand book-shops.  Why are two rival London houses now publishing editions of Scott, the better illustrated with silly pictures “out of the artists’ heads”?  Where is the final edition of Ben Jonson?

These and the rest are to come, perhaps.  Of late we have had from Oxford a great Boswell and a great Chaucer, and the magnificent Dictionary is under weigh.  So that it may be the dream is in process of being realized, though none of us shall live to see its full realization.  Meanwhile such a work as Professor Skeat’s Chaucer is not only an answer to much chatter that goes up from time to time about nine-tenths of the work on English literature being done out of England.  This and similar works are the best of all possible answers to those gentlemen who so often interrupt their own chrematistic pursuits to point out in the monthly magazines the short-comings of our two great Universities as nurseries of chrematistic youth.  In this case it is Oxford that publishes, while Cambridge supplies the learning:  and from a natural affection I had rather it were always Oxford that published, attracting to her service the learning, scholarship, intelligence of all parts of the kingdom, or, for that matter, of the world.  So might she securely found new Schools of English Literature—­were she so minded, a dozen every year.  They would do no particular harm; and meanwhile, in Walton Street, out of earshot of the New Schools, the Clarendon Press would go on serenely performing its great work.

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March 23, 1895.  Essentials and Accidents of Poetry.