for which alone you would have paid the sum, and for a beggarly half-hour’s work, you receive as much as many a City clerk earns by six hard days’ work, eight hours to the dreary day, with perhaps a family to keep and a railway contract to pay for.  Half-an-hour’s work, and if you can live on L2, 2s. a week, the rest of your time is free as air!  Moreover, you have the option of going about with a feeling that you are a being vastly superior to your fellows, because forsooth you can string fourteen lines together in decent Petrarcan form, and they cannot.  And to return for a moment to Clarinda:  it seems to me that your publisher, with all his ill-gotten gains, compares favourably with you in your treatment of your partner in the production of that sonnet What about the woman’s half-profits in the matter?  For, remember, if the publisher depends on the brains of the poet, the poet is no less dependent on the heart of the woman.  It is from woman, in nine cases out of ten, that the poets have drawn their inspiration.  And how have they, in eight cases out of this nine, treated her?  The story is but too familiar.  Will it always seem so much worse to pick a man’s brains than to break a woman’s heart?

We touched just now on the arrogance of the poet.  It is one of the most foolish and distasteful of his faults, and one which unfortunately the world has conspired from time immemorial to confirm.  He has been too long the spoiled child, too long allowed to think that anything becomes him, too long allowed to ride rough-shod over the neck of the average man.

Mrs. Browning, in Aurora Leigh, while celebrating the poet, sneers at ‘your common men’ who ’lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine.’  But why?  All these—­with, perhaps, the exception of reigning—­are very proper and necessary things to be done, and any one of them, done in the true spirit of work, is every bit as dignified as the writing of poetry, and often, I am afraid, a great deal more so.  This scorn of the common man is but another instance of the poet’s ignorance of the facts of life and the relations of things.  The hysterical bitterness with which certain sections of modern people of taste are constantly girding at the bourgeois—­which, indeed, as Omar Khayyam says, heeds ’as the sea’s self should heed a pebble-cast’—­is one of the most melancholy of recent literary phenomena.  It was not so the great masters treated the common man, nor any full-blooded age.  But the torch of taste has for the moment fallen into the hands of little men, anaemic and atrabilious, with neither laughter nor pity in their hearts.

Besides, how easy it is to misjudge your so-called ‘common man’!  That fat, undistinguished-looking Briton in the corner of the omnibus is as likely as not Mr. So-and-So, the distinguished poet; and who but those with the divining-rod of a kind heart know what refined sensibility and nobility of character may lurk under an extremely bourgeois exterior?