White is Our Lord’s:
Tomorrow I will make a knot
Of blue and white cords;
That you may see it where I ride
Among the flashing swords.
Or let me lower the key and put it thus—addressing you as plain apprentices and setting the ground no higher than an appeal for the credit of our craft. I once wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson, and with truth, that he never seemed to care who did a good piece of work so long as a good piece of work got itself done. Consider, on top of this, the amount of loss to the world’s benefit through those literary broils and squabbles. You are expected, for example, to know something, at least, of The Dunciad in your reading for the English Tripos: and I dare say many of you have admired its matchless conclusion:
Lo! thy dread empire CHAOS is restor’d:
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall.
But turn your admiration about and consider what a hand capable of writing so might have achieved in the long time it had wasted, turning over an immense buck-basket of foul linen. No, Gentlemen—take the example of poor Hazlitt—contemporary misunderstandings, heart-burnings, bickerings make poor material for great authors. I cannot find that, although once, twice or thrice, led astray into these pitfalls, Thackeray (and this is the touchstone) ever really envied another man’s success.