BOYHOOD: POETRY AND METRE
If I am to be exact, this chapter should have the sub-title of "Poetry
and Metre," for poetry, other people's and my own, and an impassioned
study of the metrical art, were the essential things about my boyhood.
Between the ages of twelve and eighteen, at which time I may be said to
have become grown-up, Poetry was my life.
My schoolboy period was not passed by me at school, except a term and a
half at an excellent private school--one which still flourishes--the
MacLaren School at Summertown. Rather reluctantly, for he was horrified
by the bullying and cruelty which went on during his own day at English
schools, my father consented to my mother's desire that we should go to
school. After he had taken many precautions, and had ascertained that
there was no bullying at Summertown, my elder brother and I were
despatched to the school in question.
I was quite happy, got on well with the schoolmasters and with Mrs.
MacLaren, the clever Scotswoman who ran the school, and gave
satisfaction in everything except learning. In this matter I developed
an extraordinary power of resistance, partly due, no doubt, to my bad
eyesight. I was pronounced, in reports, to be a boy who gave no trouble
and who was always happy and contented, and appeared to have good
brains, and yet who, somehow or other, was easily surpassed at work by
boys with inferior mental capacity.
My schoolfellows, I believe, thought me odd; but I made friends easily,
and kept them. Though I could be "managed" by anyone who wanted to get
something out of me, I was never put upon or bullied, because if
attempts were made to coerce me, I was, like the immortal Mr. Micawber,
not disinclined for a scrap. I stood erect before my fellow-boy, and
when he tried to bully me I punched his head. Mr. Micawber's comment is
too moving not to be recorded. "I and my fellow-man no longer meet upon
those glorious terms." I and my fellow-schoolboy did occasionally meet
upon those glorious terms, greatly to my enjoyment.
It happened, however, that there was an outbreak of scarlet fever in the
school, and my father became anxious, and removed us at once--somewhat,
I think, to my regret, but probably for my good. It was ultimately
decided that my brother and I, instead of returning to MacLaren's,
should, as I have already mentioned, go to the house of a clergyman, Mr.
Philpott, who was the vicar of a neighbouring village, Chewton Mendip.
The Vicarage was close to Chewton Priory, the house of my mother's
closest friend, Lady Waldegrave.
Though Mr. Philpott was not an educational expert, in the modern sense,
he was a man of good parts, fond of the arts, and something of a man of
the world. His wife was a woman of great nobility of character and also
of considerable mental power. She combined the qualities of a self-
sacrificing and devoted mother with a certain ironic, or even sardonic,
touch. She was a daughter of Mr. Tattersall, the owner of Tattersall's
sale-rooms, and at her father's house she had become acquainted in the
latter part of the 'fifties and the early 'sixties with all the great
sporting characters of that epoch. Of these she used to tell us boys
plenty of strange and curious anecdotes.
Chewton Mendip was only seven miles from Sutton, and so while there we
were in constant touch with our own home life. We had also the amusement
of seeing my father and mother when they went over, as they often did,
to dine and sleep, or stay for longer visits, at the Priory. Lady
Waldegrave was a great entertainer, and the house was thronged, not only
with her country neighbours but with numbers of smart people from
London--people such as Hayward, Bagehot, Lord Houghton, on the literary
side, and men like Sir Walter Harcourt on the political. Again,
picturesque figures in the European world, such as the Comte de Paris,
the Due d'Aumale, were often guests, and there were always members of
the Foreign Embassies and Legations. For example, it was at the Priory
that I first saw a real alive American, in the shape of General Schenk,
the United States Minister to the Court of St. James. I remember well
his teaching the whole houseparty to play poker--a game till then quite
unknown in England.
It was in the interval between leaving school and going to Chewton to
the Philpotts that I began to read poetry for myself. Before, I had only
loved it through my father's and Leaker's reading to us from
Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Spenser, Coleridge, Southey, and the old
Ballads. When, however, I discovered that I could read poetry for
myself, I tore the heart out of every book in the library that was in
verse. Though my parents would have thought it an unforgivable crime to
keep books from a child of theirs, for some reason or other I used to
like in the summer-time to get up at about five or six o'clock (I was
not a very good sleeper in those days, though I have been a perfect
sleeper ever since), dress myself, run through the silent, sleeping
house, and hide in the Great Parlour. There in absolute quietness and
with a great sense of grandeur I got out my Byron or my Shelley, and
raced though their pages in a delirium of delight. I can recall still,
and most vividly, the sunlight streaming into the Great Parlour window,
as I opened the great iron-sheathed shutters. Till breakfast-time I
lolled on the big sofa, mouthing to myself explosive couplets from
_Don Juan_. I am proud to say that, though I liked, as a boy
should, the sentimentalism of the stanzas which begin
'Tis sweet to hear the watchdog's honest bark
I was equally delighted with
Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet
The unexpected death of some old lady.
The ironic mixture of emotion and sarcasm fascinated me.
No sooner were Byron, Shelley, and Keats explored than I fell tooth and
nail upon Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, and every other possible poet
of my generation. I forget the exact date on which I became enamoured of
the Elizabethan dramatists, but it was some time between fourteen and
sixteen, and when I did catch the fever, it was severe.
As everyone ought to do under such circumstances, I thought, or
pretended to think, that Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson,
Webster, and Ford were the equals, if not indeed the superiors, of
Shakespeare.
That was a view with which my father by no means agreed, but with his
kindly wisdom he never attempted to condemn or dispute my opinions. He
left me to find out the true Shakespeare for myself. This I ultimately
did, and ended by being what, as a rule, is wrong in literature, but, I
think, right in the case of Shakespeare, a complete idolater.
But though hand-in-hand with Charles Lamb I wandered through the Eden of
the Elizabethan playwrights, I by no means neglected the Eighteenth
Century. Quite early I became a wholehearted devotee of Pope and at once
got the _Ode to the Unfortunate Lady_ by heart. I dipped into
_The Rape of the Lock_, gloried in the Moral Essays, especially in
the _Characters of Women_ and the epistle to Bathurst on the use of
riches. Gray, who was a special favourite of Leaker's, soon became a
favourite of mine, and I can still remember how I discovered the _Ode
to Poesy_ and how I went roaring its stanzas through the house. Such
lines as
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathes around
or
Hark, his hands the lyre explore,
were meat and drink to me. The _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_
quickly seized my memory.
Nobody could avoid knowing when I had made a poetic discovery. I was as
noisy as a hen that has laid an egg, or, to be more exact, I felt and
behaved like a man who has come into a fortune. For me there were no
coteries in Literature, or if there were, I belonged to them all. If I
heard somebody say that there were good lines in the poems of some
obscure author or other, I did not rest satisfied till I had got hold of
his _Complete Works_. For example, when Crabbe was spoken of, I ran
straight to _The Tales of the Hall_ and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
I even tasted _The Angel in the House_ when I heard that Rossetti
and Ruskin, and even Swinburne, admired Coventry Patmore. Though largely
disappointed, I even extracted honey from _The Angel_, though I
confess it was rather like a bee getting honey out of the artificial
flowers in the case in a parlour window. Still, if I could only find two
lines that satisfied me, I thought myself amply rewarded for the trouble
of a search. It is still a pleasure to repeat
And o'er them blew
The authentic airs of Paradise.
I felt, I remember, about the epithet "authentic" what Pinkerton in
_The Wrecker_ felt about Hebdomadary--"You're a boss word."
I have no recollection of what made me take to writing verse myself. It
was the old story. "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." My first
lisp--the first poem I ever wrote--of all the odd things in the world
was a diminutive satire in the style of Pope. Throughout my boyhood I
was an intense romanticist, and full of Elizabethan fancies, imaginings.
and even melancholies--I use the word, of course, in the sense of
Burton, or of Shakespeare. Yet all the time I read masses of Pope. The
occasion for my satire was one which must be described as inevitable in
the case of one eager to try his hand at imitations of Pope. By this I
mean that the satiric outburst was not provoked by any sort of anger. I
merely found in some of the circumstances of the life around me good
copy. One of the things I liked particularly in Pope was the Epistle
describing the Duke of Chandos's house, the poem which begins--
At Timon's villa let us pass a day,
Where all cry out what sums are thrown away.
And there, straight in front of me, was the Priory, Lady Waldegrave's
grandiose country-house. I heard plenty of criticism of the house. Its
nucleus was a Carpenter's Gothic villa, built originally by a Dean of
Wells, bought by Lord Waldegrave in the 'thirties or 'forties, and then
gradually turned by Frances, Lady Waldegrave, into a big country-house,
but a house too big for the piece of ground in which it was set. The
skeleton of the roadside villa was alleged by the local critics to show
through the swelling flesh that overlaid it. Here was a chance for the
satirist, and so I sharpened my pencil and began:
Oh, stones and mortar by a Countess laid
In sloping meadows by a turnpike glade,--
A Gothic mansion where all arts unite
To form a home for Baron, Earl or Knight.
The rest is lost! Considering that I was only twelve, and that Pope was
little read by the youth of the 'seventies, my couplets may fairly claim
to be recognised as a literary curiosity.
It is hardly necessary to say that the moment I found I could write, and
that metre and rhyme were no difficulty to me, I went at it tooth and
nail. The more I wrote the more interested did I become in metre, and it
is not too much to say that within a couple of years from my first
attempt, that is by the time I was about fourteen and a half, I had
experimented not only in most of the chief measures, but in almost all
the chief stanzas used by the English poets. To these, indeed, I added
some of my own devising. In this way Prosody early became for me what it
has always been, a source of pleasure and delight in itself. I liked
discovering metrical devices in the poets, analysing them, _i.e._
discovering the way the trick worked, and in making experiments for
myself. The result of this activity was that I had soon written enough
verse to make a little pamphlet. With this pamphlet in my pocket and
without consultation with anybody--the young of the poets are as shy as
the young of the salmon--I trudged off to Wells, the county town, five
miles distant across Mendip. How I discovered the name of the local
printer I do not know, but I did discover it, and with beating heart
approached his doors. After swearing him to secrecy, I asked for an
estimate. He was a sympathetic man, and named a price which even then
seemed to me low, and which was in reality so small that it would be
positively unsafe to name to a master-printer nowadays.
As far as I remember, I did not receive a proof, but my delight at
seeing my verses come back in print was beyond words. I remember, too,
that I received a flattering note from my first publisher, prophesying
success for future poetic ventures. But, though very happy, I believe,
and am indeed sure, that I did not entertain any idea that I was going
to become a poet. Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a
second son who must support himself. It is more probable that I
instinctively felt that although it was so great a source of joy to me,
poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I had already begun to
note the voice of pessimism raised by the poets of the 'seventies, and
to feel that they did not believe in themselves. I distinctly remember
that Tennyson's "Is there no hope for modern rhyme?" was often on my
lips and in my mind. His question distinctly expected the answer "No."
It is little wonder, then, that I did not want to be a poet, and I never
envisaged myself as a Byron, a Shelley, or a Keats.
The thing that strikes me most, on looking back at my little volume of
verse, is its uncanny competence, not merely from the point of view of
prosody, but of phraseology and what I may almost term scholarship. The
poems did not show much inspiration, but they are what 18th-century
critics would have called "well-turned." That would not be astonishing,
in the case of a boy who had been well-educated and had acquired the art
of expression. But I had not been well-educated. Owing to my ill-health
my teachers had not been allowed to press me, and I was in a sense quite
illiterate. I could hardly write, I could not spell at all, and nobody
had ever pruned my budding fancies or shown me how to transfer thoughts
to language, as one is shown, or ought to be shown, when one learns the
Greek and Latin grammars and attacks Latin prose or Latin verse. My
teaching in this direction had been more than sketchy. The only
schoolroom matter in which I had made any advance was mathematics.
Euclid and algebra fascinated me. I felt for them exactly what I felt
for poetry. Though I did not know till many years afterwards that when
Pythagoras discovered the forty-seventh proposition he sacrificed a yoke
of oxen, not to Pallas Athene but to the Muses, I was instinctively
exactly of his opinion. I can remember to this day how I worked out the
proof of the forty-seventh proposition with Mr. Battersby, a young
Cambridge man who was curate to Mr. Philpott and who took us on in
mathematics. The realisation of the absolute, unalterable fact that in
every right-angled triangle the square of the side subtending it is
equal to the squares of the sides containing it, filled me with the kind
of joy and glory that one feels on reading for the first time Keats's
_Ode to a Nightingale_ or one of the great passages in Shakespeare.
I saw the genius of delight unfold his purple wing. I was transfigured
and seemed to tread upon air. For the first time in my life I realised
the determination of an absolute relationship. A great window had been
opened before my eyes. I saw all things new. My utter satisfaction could
not be spoiled by feeling, as one does in the case of the earlier
propositions of Euclid, that I had been proving what I knew already--
something about which I could have made myself sure by the use of a
foot-rule or a tape-measure. I had acquired knowledge, by an act of pure
reasoning and not merely through the senses. I felt below my feet a
rock-bed foundation which nothing could shake. Come what might, a^2 =
b^2 + c^2. No one could ever deprive me of that priceless possession.
At that time I did not see or dream of the connection which no doubt
does exist between mathematics and poetry--the connection which made the
wise Dryden say that every poet ought to be something of a
mathematician. Needless to say, my teachers did not see the connection.
They were simply amazed that the same person should become as drunk with
geometry and algebra as with poetry. Probably they consoled themselves
by the thought that I was one of the people who could persuade
themselves into believing anything!
It is of importance to record my precocity in the use of measured
language, from the point of view of the growth of my mind. It will, I
think, also amuse those of my readers who have written poetry for
themselves in their youth (that, I suppose, is the case with most of us)
to observe my hardihood in the way of metrical experiment. Here is the
Invocation to the Muses which served as an Introduction to my little
book. It will be noted that I have here tried my hand at my favourite
measure, the dactylic. Towards anapaests I have always felt a certain
coldness, if not indeed repulsion.
TO THE MUSES
(1874)
Come to my aid, Muses love-laden, lyrical:
Come to my aid, Comic, Tragic, Satirical.
Come and breathe into me
Strains such as swept from Keats' heaven-strung lyre,
Strains such as Shelley's, which never can tire.
Come then, and sing to me,
Sing me an ode such as Byron would sing,
Passionate, love-stirring, quick to begin.
Why come you not to me?
Then must I write lyrics after vile rules
Made by some idiot, used by worse fools--
Then the deuce take you all!
(Ætat. 14.)
I have to thank Mr. Edmund Gosse for inspiring this attempt. I hope he
will forgive even if he does not forget. I had made a shopping
expedition into Bristol, and went to tea or luncheon at Clifton Hill
House where lived my mother's brother, John Addington Symonds. It
happened that Mr. Gosse was a visitor at the house on the day in
question, and that to my great delight we all talked poetry. I saw my
chance, and proceeded to propound to these two authorities the following
question: "Why is it that nobody has ever written an English poem in
pure dactyls?" Greatly to my surprise and joy, Mr. Gosse informed me
that it had been done. Thereupon he quoted the first four lines of what
has ever since been a favourite poem of mine, Waller's lines to Hylas:
Hylas, O Hylas! why sit we mute,
Now that each bird saluteth the spring?
Tie up the slackened strings of thy lute,
Never may'st thou want matter to sing.
I hope I am not quoting incorrectly, but it is nearly fifty years since
I saw the poem and at the moment I have not got a Waller handy. With the
exactitude of youth I verified Mr. Gosse's quotation the moment I got
home. I took my poetry very seriously in those days. I rushed to the
Great Parlour, and though then quite indifferent to such a material
thing as fine printing, I actually found the poem in one of
Baskerville's exquisite productions.
The poem next to my dactylic Introduction was a dramatic lyric, partly
blank verse and partly rhymed choruses, in the Swinburne manner. In my
poem the virtuous and "misunderstood" Byron is pursued and persecuted by
the spirits of Evil, Hypocrisy, Fraud, and Tyranny, but is finally
redeemed by the Spirit of Good, whose function it is to introduce the
triumphant poet to Shelley.
There follows another dramatic lyric on Shelley's death, which takes the
form of the death-bed confession to his priest of an old sailor at
Spezzia. The old man, according to a story published in 1875, was one of
the crew of a small ship which ran down the boat containing Shelley and
Williams, under the mistaken impression that the rich "milord Byron" was
on board, with lots of money. Here the style is more that of Browning
than of Swinburne. A few lines are quite sufficient to show the sort of
progress I was making in blank verse.
What noise of feet is that? Ah, 'tis the priest.
Here, priest, I have a sin hangs heavy. See
There by the fishing-nets that lovely youth,
I killed him--oh, 'twas fifty years ago,
Only, tonight he will not let me rest,
But looks with loving eyes, making me fear.
Oh, Father, 'twas not him I meant to kill,
'Twas the rich lord I coveted to rob,
He with the bright wild eyes and haughty mien.
Imitation of Browning was by no means a passing mood with me. A year
before I tackled my Shelley and Byron poems, I had written a piece of
imitation Browningese which is not without its stock of amusement,
considering what was to be the fate of the versifier.
JEAN DUVAL'S LAST WORDS
Jean Duval has presented himself at a Paris newspaper office, asking for
employment; this being refused him he makes a last request, offering to
sell his muse, which he had hoped to keep unhired. This also being
refused, his want of bread overcomes him, and he curses the Editor and
dies.
A plague on all gold, say I,
I who must win it, or die.
Here goes, I'll sell my Muse.
You may buy her for twenty sous.
No, I'll write by the ream,
Only give me your theme,
And a sou more for a light
To put in my garret at night.
Garret!--ah, I was forgetting,
My present's a very cheap letting
Under the prison wall,
Just where it grows so tall.
Why don't I steal, you say?
Oh, I wasn't brought up that way.
Will you give me the twenty sous?
Come, it isn't much to lose.
You won't? Then I die. Ah, well,
God will find you a lodging in hell.
(_Ætat_. 14.)
The melancholy which belongs to the young poet, a melancholy which had
to be feigned in my case, was reserved for sonnets of a somewhat
antinomian type. Here is an example.
SONNET
(1875)
O why so cruel, ye that have left behind
Life's fears, and from draped death have drawn the veil?
Oh, why so cruel? Does life or death avail?
Why tell us not?--why leave us here so blind,
To tread this earth, not sure that we may find
Even an end beyond this worldly pale
Of petty hates and loves so weak and frail?
O why not speak?--is it so great a thing
To cross death's stream and whisper in the ear
Of us weak mortals some faint hope or cheer?
Or tell us, dead ones, if the hopes that spring
From joyous hours when all seems bright and clear
Have any truth. O speak, ye dead, and say
If that in hope of dying, live we may.
(_Ætat_. 15.)
A metrical essay of which I am more proud is a poem written at the end
of 1874, or possibly at the beginning of 1875. With a daring which now
seems to me incredible I undertook to write in that most difficult of
measures, the Spenserian stanza. The matter of the composition is by no
means memorable, but I think I have a right to congratulate myself upon
the fact that I was able at that age to manage the triple rhymes and the
twelve-syllable line at the end of each stanza without coming a complete
cropper. I could not do it now, even if my life depended on it.
TO THE POWERS OF SONG
I
Spirit, whose harmony doth fill the mind,
Deign now to hear the wailing of a song
That lifts to thee its voice, and strives to find
Aught that may raise it from the servile throng
Who seek on earth but living to prolong.
For them no goddess, no fair poets reign,
They hear no singing, as the earth along
They move to their dull tasks; they live, they wane,
They die, and dying, not a thought of thee retain.
II
Thou art the Muse of whom the Grecian knew,
The power that reigneth in each loving heart;
From thee the sages their great teachings drew.
Thou mak'st life tuneful by the poet's art.
Without thy aid the love-god's fiery dart
Wakes but a savage and a blind desire,
Where nought of beauty e'er can claim a part.
Without thee, all to which frail men aspire
Has nothing good, is but of this poor earth, no higher.
III
Unhappy they who wander without light,
And know thee not, thou goddess of sweet life;
Cursed are they all that live not in thy sight,
Cursed by themselves they cannot drown the strife
In thee, of passion, of the ills so rife
On earth; they have no star, no hope, no love,
To guide them in the stormy ways of life;
They are but as the beasts who slowly move
On the world's face, nor care to look for light above.
IV
I am not as these men; I look for light,
But none appears, no rays for me are flung.
I would not be with those that sit in night;
I fain would be that glorious host among,
That band of poets who have greatly sung.
But woe, alas, I cannot, I no power
Of singing have, all my tired heart is wrung
To think I might have known a happier hour,
And sung myself, not let my aching spirit cower.
(_Ætat_. 14.)
A bad poem, though interesting from the number of poets mentioned, is a
satiric effort entitled _The Examination_. It supposes that all the
living poets have been summoned by Apollo to undergo a competitive
examination. The bards, summoned by postcards, which had just then been
introduced, repair to Parnassus and are shown to the Hall. Rossetti and
Morris, however, make a fuss because the paper is not to their taste.
Walt Whitman, already a great favourite of mine, "though spurning a
jingle," is hailed as "the singer of songs for all time." Proteus
(Wilfrid Blount) is mentioned, for my cult for him was already growing.
Among other poets who appear, but who have since died to fame, are Lord
Lytton, Lord Southesk, Lord Lome, Mrs. Singleton, and Martin Tupper. In
the end Apollo becomes "fed up" with his versifiers, and dismisses them
all with the intimation that any who have passed will receive printed
cards. The curtain is rung down with the gloomy couplet:
Six months have elapsed, but no poet or bard,
So far as I know, has yet got a card
Another set of verses, written between the ages of fourteen and fifteen,
which are worth recalling from the point of view of metre include some
English hexameters. I was inspired to write them by an intense
admiration of Clough's _Amours de Voyage_, an admiration which
grows greater, not lesser, with years.
As I have started upon the subject of verse, I think I had better pursue
the course of the stream until, as the old geographers used to say about
the Rhine, its waters were lost in the sands, in my case not of Holland
but of Prose.
From 1877 to the time when I actually entered Balliol, at eighteen and a
half, I went on writing verse, and was fortunate enough to get one or
two pieces published. Besides two sonnets which were accepted by _The
Spectator_--sonnets whose only _raison d'être_ was a certain
competence of expression--was a poem entitled _Love's Arrows_,
which was accepted, to my great delight, by Sir George Grove, then the
Editor of _Macmillan's Magazine_, a periodical given up to
_belles-lettres_. The poem may be best described as in the Burne
Jones manner. I shall not, however, quote any part of it, except the
prose introduction, which I still regard with a certain enthusiasm as a
successful fake. It ran as follows:
At a league's distance from the town of Ponteille in Provence and hard
by the shrine of Our Lady of Marten, there is in the midst of verdant
meadows a little pool, overshadowed on all sides by branching oak-trees,
and surrounded at the water's edge by a green sward so fruitful that in
spring it seemeth, for the abundance of white lilies, as covered with
half-melted snow. Unto this fair place a damsel from out a near village
once came to gather white flowers for the decking of Our Lady's chapel;
and while so doing saw lying in the grass a naked boy; in his hair were
tangled blue waterflowers, and at his side lay a bow and marvellously
wrought quivers of two arrows, one tipped at the point with gold, the
other with lead. These the damsel, taking up the quiver, drew out; but
as she did so the gold arrow did prick her finger, and so sorely that,
starting at the pain, she let fall the leaden one upon the sleeping boy.
He at the touch of that arrow sprang up, and crying against her with
much loathing, fled over the meadows. She followed him to overtake him,
but could not, albeit she strove greatly; and soon, wearied with her
running, fell upon the grass in a swoon. Here had she lain, had not a
goatherd of those parts found her and brought her to the village. Thus
was much woe wrought unto the damsel, for after this she never again
knew any joy, nor delighted in aught, save only it were to sit waiting
and watching among the lilies by the pool. By these things it seemeth
that the boy was not mortal, as she supposed, but rather the Demon or
Spirit of Love, whom John of Dreux for his two arrows holdeth to be that
same Eros of Greece.--MSS. _Mus. Aix. B._ 754. Needless to say,
it was a pure invention and not a copy, or travesty of an old model. I
was egregiously proud of the scription at the end which, if I remember
rightly, my father helped me to concoct. A certain interest has always
attached in my mind to this piece of prose. To read it one would imagine
that the author had closely studied the translations of Morris and other
Tenderers of the French romances, but as far as I know I had not read
any of them. The sole inspiration of my forgery were a few short
references in Rossetti and Swinburne. This shows that in the case of
literary forgeries one need not be surprised by verisimilitudes, and
that it is never safe to say that a literary forger could not have done
this or that. If he happens to have a certain flair for language and the
tricks of the literary trade, he can do a wonderful amount of forgery
upon a very small stock of knowledge. After all, George Byron forged
Sonnets by Keats which took in Lord Houghton--a very good judge in the
case of Keats.