228 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



gibility would not misbecome the tomb of Cheops, it 

 may occur to us that one of the greatest of our poets is 

 unrepresented in our pedantic Pantheon. Till which 

 time comes Mr. Swinburne's fine eulogy will take the 

 place of a bad statue. " This poet," he writes, " a poor 

 scholar of humblest parentage lived to perfect the ex- 

 quisite metre invented for narrative by Chaucer, giving 

 it (to my ear at least) more of weight and depth, 

 of force and fulness, than its founder had to give ; he 

 invented the highest and hardest form of English verse, 

 the only instrument since found possible for our tragic 

 or epic poetry ; he created the modern tragic drama ; 

 and at the age of thirty he went 



" ' Where Orpheus and where Homer are.'" 



" Surelv there are not more than two or three names 

 in any literature which can be set above the poets of 

 whom this is the least that can in simple truth be said. 

 There is no record extant of his living likeness ; if his 

 country should ever bear men worthy to raise a statue 

 or monument to his memory, he should stand before 

 them with the head and eyes of an Apollo, looking 

 homeward from earth into the sun : a face and figure, in 

 the poet's own great phrase, 



" ' Like his desire, lift upward and divine 



j >> 



To leave Marlowe for a while — and before leaving 

 Deptford — it may not misbecome me to remark for the 

 benefit of those who still read Scott in an age which has 

 turned aside after brazen images with feet of clay — • 

 that at Sayes Court — long since pulled down — are laid 

 some of the most brilliant scenes in Kenilworth. It is 

 here that Blount and Raleigh first appear in the pages 

 of perhaps the finest historical novel in the world ; it is 

 here that Tressilian, milksoppy to the verge of nausea 

 even for one of Scott's heroes, brings Wayland Smith to 

 cure Sussex of Leicester's broth ; it is to Sayes Court 



