"Do you desire to hear more?" shouted the Doctor.
And we said, "Yes, sir!"
"Then seek it in the immortal pages from whence the boy Mitchell has dared to steal it!" he thundered out, growing his well-known, deadly red colour. "With predatory hand and audacity from which the most hardened criminal would have shrunk, this abominable boy, insolently counting on the ignorance of those whose unfortunate duty it is to instruct him, has appropriated the Bard to his own vile uses; and his cunning has led him to interpolate and alter the text in such a manner that sundry passages are made to appear as one. Mitchell will meet me in my study after morning school. I need say no more. Words fail me----"
And they actually did, which was a record in its way. The Doctor panted for a bit, then he picked up Mitchell's poem, or rather, Shakespeare's, as if it was a mouse that had been dead a fortnight, and dropped it on the ground. It was rather a solemn moment--especially for Mitchell--and the only funny thing about it was to see the Sixth. Of course, they'd been had by Mitchell, just the same as us in the Fifth--in fact, everybody; but they tried to look as if they'd known it was Shakespeare from the first. As for Mitchell, he had made the rather rash mistake of thinking old Dunston and Peacock and Fortescue didn't know any more about Shakespeare than he did; and now he sat awful white, but resigned. As a matter of fact, he got the worst flogging he ever did get, and had a narrow squeak of being expelled also. It calmed him down for days afterwards, and he was also called "King John" till the end of the term, as a mark of contempt, which he badly hated.
Then the Doctor snorted himself calm, and his face grew its usual colour. He picked up Thwaites, and ended with the tamest poem of the lot, in my opinion. Which shows that grown-up people and boys have a very different idea about what is poetry and what isn't.
"The verses of Thwaites have won the poet's bay," said Dr. Dunston. "Thwaites alone has written a work worthy to be called a poem. His stanzas possess music and reveal thought and feeling. Neither technically are they open to grave objection. I congratulate Thwaites. Though not robust, or a pillar of strength, either in his class, or in the field, he possesses a refined mind, a capacity of emotion and a power for expressing that emotion in terms of poetry that time and application may possibly ripen and mature. Such, at least, is my opinion, and those who have sat in judgment share it with me."
He then gave us Thwaites--twittering sort of stuff, and interesting, not because Thwaites had got "the poet's bay," whatever that is, but because he had landed Peacock's guinea. Nobody much liked his prize poem except the masters, and even Thwaites himself said it wasn't any real good, and was written when he had a beastly sore throat and was feeling utterly down on his luck. In fact, he was going to call it "Lines Written in Dejection at Merivale," like real poets do, only he got better before he finished the last verse, and so didn't.
TO THE EARTH
BY THWAITES
Suffer, sad earth; no pain can equal thine:
Thy giant heart must ever be a shrine
For all the sorrows of Humanity.
As one by one the stricken ages die,
The bright beams of the stars are turned to tears,
And howling winds that whistle down the years
Sigh "Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow!" and are gone
Into the silence of oblivion.
Suffer, great world; the poison fangs of Death
Can only wound, not kill thee.... Lo! the breath
Of everlasting dawn is in the wind;
The distant throbbing of a giant Mind
Shall set the music of the Universe
Once more in time--with harmony coerce
The discord of a warring race to cease
And sorrow die within the arms of peace.