The answer is fairly simple.  Literature (once more) is a record of memorable speech; it preserves in words a record of such thoughts or of such deeds as we deem worth preserving.  Now if you will imagine yourself a very primitive man, lacking paper or parchment; or a slightly less primitive, but very poor, man to whom the price of parchment and ink is prohibitive; you have two ways of going to work.  You can carve your words upon trees or stones (a laborious process) or you can commit them to memory and carry them about in your head; which is cheaper and handier.  For an illustration, you find it useful, anticipating the tax-collector, to know how many days there are in the current month.  But further you find it a nuisance and a ruinous waste of time to run off to the tribal tree or monolith whenever the calculation comes up; so you invent a formula, and you cast that formula into verse for the simple reason that verse, with its tags, alliterations, beat of syllables, jingle of rhymes (however your tribe has chosen to invent it), has a knack, not possessed by prose, of sticking in your head.  You do not say, ’Quick thy tablets, memory!  Let me see—­January has 31 days, February 28 days, March 31 days, April 30 days.’  You invent a verse:—­

     Thirty days hath September,
     April, June and November...

Nay, it has been whispered to me, Gentlemen, that in this University some such process of memorising in verse has been applied by bold bad irreverently-minded men even to the “Evidences” of our cherished Paley.

This, you will say, is mere verse, and not yet within measurable distance of poetry.  But wait!  The men who said the more memorable things, or sang them—­the men who recounted deeds and genealogies of heroes, plagues and famines, assassinations, escapes from captivity, wanderings and conquests of the clan, all the ’old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago’—­the men who sang these things for their living, for a supper, a bed in the great hall, and something in their wallet to carry them on to the next lordship—­these were gentlemen, scops, bards, minstrels (call them how you will), a professional class who had great need of a full repertory in a land swarming with petty chieftains, and to adapt their strains to the particular hall of entertainment.  It would never do, for example, to flatter the prowess of the Billings in the house of the Hoppings, their hereditary foes, or to bore the Wokings (who lived where the crematorium now is) with the complicated genealogy of the Tootings:  for this would have been to miss that appropriateness which I preached to you in my second lecture as a preliminary rule of good writing.  Nay, when the Billings intermarried with the Tootings—­when the Billings took to cooing, so to speak—­a hasty blend of excerpts would be required for the “Epithalamium.”  So it was all a highly difficult business, needing adaptability, a quick wit, a goodly stock of songs, a retentive memory and every artifice to assist it.  Take “Widsith,” for example, the ‘far-travelled man.’  He begins:—­