reasons WILLIAM CORY 1 I WILLIAM CORY- he was William Johnson by birth and took the name of Cory in 1872 for family was born in January, 1823, and died in 1892, a few months before reaching the age of seventy. The centenary of his birthday, therefore, falls in the present year, and it is fitting that the occasion should not pass unhonoured in a Society devoted to the interests of Literature, and particularly by the Chair in that Society chiefly concerned with poetry. For Cory was a poet, of slight and desultory genius, writing and publishing very little verse, and yet with a secure though slender claim to 'a permanent place,' as the 'Dictionary of National Biography' puts it, 'among English lyrists.' He is in that work wrongly credited with several volumes of poems. In fact he published, apart from a few classical experiments composed chiefly in the nature of school exercises, but two small pamphlets of verse. The first of these, 'Ionica,' 2 appeared in 1858, from the house of Smith Elder, and it was followed in 1877 by the privately 1 Read to the Royal Society of Literature from the Chair of Poetry. 2 Ionica had been preceded in 1843 by the prize poem Plato, which obtained the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge in that year. printed 'Ionica II,' containing a further twentyfive poems. Both of these little volumes appeared anonymously. In 1891 he added a few new poems to the old ones, and published them together, retaining the original title, with George Allen, the authorship still being unacknowledged. Small as the volume of Cory's poems is, it is yet considerably smaller when it is reduced to those pieces by which his reputation as a lyrist is established. For the most part the verses are marked more clearly by personality than by lyric success. Cory himself was always shy about their publication, considering them to be rather the occasional notes of personal intimacies and circumstance, not designed for a wider public. Having been a boy at Eton himself, he left Cambridge after a brilliant career to take up a mastership in that school, and he remained there for twenty-seven years. Of the devotion and the beauty of character which he brought to his task, and kept unspoilt through the long term of its exercise, more is to be said, but it may here be noted that many of his verses are the charming but slight and closely personal record of the contacts and occasions of those years. His poetic gift, however, could be used to much more general effect, and lying among the more occasional pages of his book are to be found others that will continue to delight the readers that they may find. 'Mimnermus in Church,' 'Amaturus,' 'A Queen's Visit,' 'After reading "Maud," 'A Cruise,' 'A Fable,' 'A Ballad for a Boy,' 'Barine,' 'Mir ist Leide,' 'Remember,' 'An Apology,' 'Reparabo,' 'Prospero,' and 'Heraclitus,' seem to me to be the pick of these, and they make a little sheaf fine enough in quality to keep Cory's name fresh in English poetry. Here are two of them: REPARABO The world will rob me of my friends, For while my comrades pass away And who was this? they ask; and then Why fret? the hawks I trained are flown: I could not keep their wings half-grown, With lattice opened wide I stand And, oh! if one with sullied plume My love makes signals: 'there is room, HERACLITUS They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, 'Heraclitus' is both Cory's best and his most celebrated poem. In its company some of the other pieces will survive, as they should do, but without it they would probably fall into neglect. In reading the lovely lines 'I wept as I remember'd how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky...' it is interesting to recall a passage in Lord Lyttelton's Elegy on his wife published in 1747: 'In vain I look around O'er all the well-known Ground Where oft in tender Talk We saw the Summer Sun go down the Sky.' 'Heraclitus,' translation or rendering though it is, becomes a perfect English lyric, and while some of Cory's other poems are worthy of a place beside it, none can be said quite to match it. II WHILE, however, the claims of Cory's verse may, in their own modest though distinguished way, be readily allowed, he gave little of his time or energy to poetical composition, and it was not as a poet that he most readily expressed himself. He belonged to a type that we are tempted to consider as being peculiarly English. A liberal classical education and a fine general culture combined in him to produce a mind observant, inquisitive, and lucidly critical. This is admirable enough but not uncommon. The uncommon thing is when such a mind, constantly exercised as it is apt to be in a wide range of insistent but ephemeral interests, retains a genuinely unsophisticated delight in profound emotional simplicities; when, in other words, the poetry of a mind is not destroyed by the constant application of affairs, by keeping abreast of current events. And this happy constitution of mind, though it must always be rare, is, it might seem, commoner in Englishmen than in most. What is meant is something far more than the mere educated interest in art and letters which may be found often enough in men of affairs the world over. It is the gift of submitting all events and institutions, as they have to be dealt with, not only to history, but to the imaginative wisdom which is the flower of the universal mind- in fact to |