Well, it is sometimes said that Oxford men make better journalists than Cambridge men, and some attribute this to the discipline of their great School of Literae Humaniores, which obliges them to bring up a weekly essay to their tutor, who discusses it.  Cambridge men retort that all Oxford men are journalists, and throw, of course, some accent of scorn on the word.  But may I urge—­and remember please that my credit is pledged to you now—­may I urge that this is not a wholly convincing answer?  For, to begin with, Oxford men have not changed their natures since leaving school, but are, by process upon lines not widely divergent from your own, much the same pleasant sensible fellows you remember.  And, next, if you truly despise journalism, why then despise it, have done with it and leave it alone.  But I pray you, do not despise it if you mean to practise it, though it be but as a step to something better.  For while the ways of art are hard at the best, they will break you if you go unsustained by belief in what you are trying to do.

In asking you to practise the written word, I began with such low but necessary things as propriety, perspicuity, accuracy.  But persuasion—­the highest form of persuasion at any rate—­cannot be achieved without a sense of beauty.  And now I shoot a second rapid—­I want you to practise verse, and to practise it assiduously....  I am quite serious.  Let me remind you that, if there ever was an ancient state of which we of Great Britain have great right and should have greater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual heirs, that state was Imperial Rome.  And of the Romans (whom you will allow to have been a practical people) nothing is more certain than the value they set upon acquiring verse.  To them it was not only (as Dr Johnson said of Greek) ‘like old lace—­you can never have too much of it.’  They cultivated it with a straight eye to national improvement.  Among them, as a scholar reminded us the other day, you find ’an educational system deliberately and steadily directed towards the development of poetical talent.  They were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the Greeks, that they were born to art and literature....  The characteristic Roman triumphs are the triumphs of a material civilisation.’  Rome’s role in the world was ‘the absorption of outlying genius.’  Themselves an unimaginative race with a language not too tractable to poetry, they made great poetry, and they made it of patient set purpose, of hard practice.  I shall revert to this and maybe amplify reasons in another lecture.  For the moment I content myself with stating the fact that no nation ever believed in poetry so deeply as the Romans.

Perpend this then, and do not too hastily deride my plea that you should practise verse-writing.  I know most of the objections, though I may not remember all. Mediocribus esse poetis, etc.—­that summarises most of them:  yet of an infliction of much bad verse from you, if I am prepared to endure it, why should anyone else complain?  I say that the youth of a University ought to practise verse-writing; and will try to bring this home to you by an argument convincing to me, though I have never seen it in print.