“Pen, ink, and paper. What else?” said Demosthenes.
“Doesn’t it take brains to write a poem?” said Raleigh.
“Doesn’t it take brains to make a pair of shoes?” retorted Demosthenes, swallowing a pebble in his haste.
“They’ve got a right to the stationery, though,” put in Blackstone. “A clear legal right to it. If they choose to write poems on the paper instead of boring people to death with letters, as most of us do, that’s their own affair.”
“Well, they’re very wasteful,” said Demosthenes.
“We can meet that easily enough,” observed Cassius. “Furnish each writing-table with a slate. I should think they’d be pleased with that. It’s so much easier to rub out the wrong word.”
“Most poets prefer to rub out the right word,” growled Confucius. “Besides, I shall never consent to slates in this house-boat. The squeaking of the pencils would be worse than the poems themselves.”
“That’s true,” said Cassius. “I never thought of that. If a dozen poets got to work on those slates at once, a fife corps wouldn’t be a circumstance to them.”
“Well, it all goes to prove what I have thought all along,” said Doctor Johnson. “Homer’s idea is a good one, and Samson was wise in backing it up. The poets need to be concentrated somewhere where they will not be a nuisance to other people, and where other people will not be a nuisance to them. Homer ought to have a place to compose in where the vingt-et-un players will not interrupt his frenzies, and, on the other hand, the vingt-et-un and other players should be protected from the wooers of the muse. I’ll vote to have the Poets’ Corner, and in it I move that Cassius’s slate idea be carried out. It will be a great saving, and if the corner we select be far enough away from the other corners of the club, the squeaking of the slate-pencils need bother no one.”
“I agree to that,” said Blackstone. “Only I think it should be understood that, in granting the petition of the poets, we do not bind ourselves to yield to doctors and lawyers and shoemakers and plumbers in case they should each want a corner to themselves.”