story, which was the first.  In the French story all is knightly smooth, refined as well as simple and strong.  And where did the mediaeval imagination get its material for the story?  Partly, perhaps, from the story of Joseph in the Bible, partly from the story of Abraham; but the scriptural material is so admirably worked over that the whole thing appears deliciously original.  That was the great art of the Middle Ages—­to make old, old things quite new by the magic of spiritual imagination.  Men then lived in a world of dreams.  And that world still attracts us, for the simple reason that happiness chiefly consists in dreams.  Exact science may help us a great deal no doubt, but mathematics do not make us any happier.  Dreams do, if we can believe them.  The Middle Ages could believe them; we, at the best, can only try.

CHAPTER XIV

“IONICA”

I am going now to talk about a very rare kind of poetry in a very rare little book, like fine wine in a small and precious flask.  The author never put his name to the book—­indeed for many years it was not known who wrote the volume.  We now know that the author was a school teacher called William Johnson who, later in life, coming into a small fortune, changed his name to William Cory.  He was born sometime about 1823, and died in 1892.  He was, I believe, an Oxford man and was assistant master of Eton College for a number of years.  Judging from his poems, he must have found pleasure in his profession as well as pain.  There is a strange sadness nearly always, but this sadness is mixed with expressions of love for the educational establishment which he directed, and for the students whose minds he helped to form.  He must have been otherwise a very shy man.  Scarcely anything seems to be known about him after his departure from educational circles, although everybody of taste now knows his poems.  I wish to speak of them because I think that literary graduates of this university ought to be at least familiar with the name “Ionica.”  At all events you should know something about the man and about the best of his poems.  If you should ask why so little has yet been said about him in books on English literature, I would answer that in the first place he was a very small poet writing in the time of giants, having for competitors Tennyson, Browning and others.  He could scarcely make his small pipe heard in the thunder of those great organ tones.  In the second place his verses were never written to please the public at all.  They were written only for fine scholars, and even the titles of many of them cannot be explained by a person devoid of some Greek culture.  So the little book, which appeared quite early in the Victorian Age, was soon forgotten.  Being forgotten it ran out of print and disappeared.  Then somebody remembered that it had existed.  I have told you that it was like the tone of a little pipe or flute as compared with