has no significance at all read in an American school-book two thousand
miles, and a hundred and fifty years from the writer of it, compared
with the grim shock it gives you when you see it actually cut deep in
the stone, to be a memorial always of a dead man somewhere not far away.
Original 'That you should have heard of Nicholas Rowe,' said Miss Corke, 'is altogether too much to expect. Dear me! it would be considerably easier to improve your mind if it had ever been tried before. But he was poet-laureate for George the First--you understand the term?'
'I think so,' I said. 'They contract to supply the Royal Family with
poetry, by the year, at a salary. We have nothing of the kind in
America. You see our Presidents differ so. They might not all like
poetry. And in that case it would be wasted, for there isn't a magazine
in the country that would take it second-hand.'
'Besides having no poets who could do it properly, poor things!' said
Miss Corke--to which I acceded without difficulty.
'Well, Mr. Rowe was a poet-laureate, though that has nothing whatever
to do with it. But he had a great friend in Mr. Pope--Pope, you know
him--by reputation--and when he and his daughter died, Mr. Pope and Mrs.
Rowe felt so bad about it that he wrote those mournful lines, and she
had'em put up.