That is true. But a friend having remarked to me that Cash was more than kind hearts, I put the thing down in a formula for myself, thus,
Cash > Kind Hearts > Coronets
and sat gazing at it for a long time, until it awoke other thoughts in me.
And the first was this: "'Kind hearts are more than Coronets.' What an intolerably bad line! What a shocking line—or rather, half-line! What an outrage!"
When verse is concerned one must not mince matters. It is too sacred. One must have no reservations. One must ride roughshod over one's nearest and dearest, and proclaim bad verse aloud, and say, "Aroint! Honi!"
No reverend name, no illustrious label half-mixed with the State itself, should deter one. Nothing should impede the truth on bad verse save a substantial offer of money—and where is the chance of that in such a galley?
No! It is prime duty. Having the thing before you, having seen it, whether your opinion is asked or no, speak out at once and say: "Madam, this is not poetry, it is verse. It is not good verse; it is bad verse."
And what wickedly bad verse!
I remember coming down on to Stamford one July morning (I was following the Roman road across Burleigh Park, and so down to the river), when I saw in the window of a little shop among the first houses of the town, hither of the bridge, a card; an ornamented card; a florally ornamented card, put up for sale. It was a set of verses all about a rich man who owned Burleigh, that great house, and who married a young woman much poorer than himself. I read them and paid little attention to them. I thought they were some local thing made up to sell in a charity. But a little way on I found another set in another window, and then another, all just the same. I read them again, and something familiar echoed in my mind; something of childhood ... I sought.... There was an odd connection with "Locksley Hall." Yet what had "Locksley Hall" to do with Burleigh? Then it broke in on me like an evil-doer breaking sacred locks: Tennyson! Tennyson had written this amazing thing!