What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so?  Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—­we may stop there.  Of these all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well-to-do.  It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say:  but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth.  As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men:  which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give.  As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well-to-do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well-to-do, he would no more have attained to writing “Saul” or “The Ring and the Book” than Ruskin would have attained to writing “Modern Painters” if his father had not dealt prosperously in business.  Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted.  There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment.  These are dreadful facts, but let us face them.  It is—­however dishonouring to us as a nation—­certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance.  Believe me—­and I have spent a great part of the last ten years in watching some 320 Elementary Schools—­we may prate of democracy, but actually a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.

What do I argue from this?  I argue that until we can bring more intellectual freedom into our State, more ’joy in widest commonalty spread,’ upon you, a few favoured ones, rests an obligation to see that the springs of English poetry do not fail.  I put it to you that of this glory of our birth and state you are the temporary stewards.  I put it to the University, considered as a dispenser of intellectual light, that to treat English poetry as though it had died with Tennyson and your lecturers had but to compose the features of a corpse, is to abnegate high hope for the sake of a barren convenience.  I put it to the Colleges, considered as disciplinary bodies, that the old way of letting Coleridge slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way.  Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone’s reaching perfection.  It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector.  And when you point with pride to Milton’s and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you ’What poets are they shading to-day?  Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns to drape Doctors of Letters?’