“I have, sir,” said Edwin shyly.
“I have already gathered so, Ingleby. Has anybody else read it?”
Silence. “I think I shall ask the head master to set it to the Middle School as a holiday task,” said Mr. Leeming.
Thus narrowly did Edwin escape the disaster of having Scott spoiled for him.
Mr. Leeming was the master in charge of the library, and Edwin began to spend the long winter lock-ups in this room. Most of the boys who frequented it came there for the bound volumes of the Illustrated London News, with their pictures of the Franco-Prussian War, Irish evictions, the launching of the Great Eastern, and mild excitements of that kind. Edwin found himself drawn early to the bookcase that held the poets. To his great joy he discovered that the key of his playbox fitted the case; and so he would sometimes sneak into the room at odd moments in the day and carry away with him certain slim green volumes from the top shelf. These were Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, together with their Complete Works. He had been attracted to them in the first place by the memory of a polished urn, about as graceful in contour as a carpenter’s baluster, that stood in a neglected corner of the parish church at home. This urn was encircled by a scroll which bore these directions
“O smite thy breast and drop a tear—
For know thy Shenstone’s dust lies here.”
A palpable falsehood; for Edwin had already discovered the tomb of the elegist in another part of the churchyard, elbowed almost into the path by that of a Victorian ironmonger.
But it was something to have been born in the same parish as a poet; and Edwin, at an age when everything is a matter of taking sides, ranged himself boldly with Shenstone and pitted his judgment against that of Johnson, who rather sniffed at the poet’s unreality, and quoted Gray’s letters in his despite. The crook and the pipe and the kid were to Edwin very real things, as one supposes they were almost real to the age of the pastoral ballad; and the atmosphere was the more vital to him because he dimly remembered the sight of the poet’s lawns frosted on misty mornings of winter, the sighing of the Leasowes beeches, and the damp drippings of the winter woods. Thus he absorbed not only Shenstone but Shenstone’s contemporaries: men like Dyer and Lyttleton and Akenside, and since he had no other standard than that of Johnson he classed them by the same lights as their contemporaries. Brooding among Augustan poetasters in the library Mr. Leeming found him.
“Poetry, Ingleby?”
“Yes, sir.”