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Return to Masterpieces

I.

A year ago, 1n this very city, and to an audience much
the same as this, I made a plea for a catholic taste in
reading. I urged my hearers not to be too academic in their selection,
not to keep only to the main roads of letters, but to amuse
themselves in the by-paths. I still adhere to that view. It is
enormous fun to browse at large over the wide domain of literature,
and one may pick up some surprising treasures in unlikely
places. In the last two centuries, for example, there have been many
minor poets who wrote. the Scots vernacular, most of them uncommonly
bad. But even in the worst of them you can find an occasional verse
of singular beauty. I have tried to collect some of these unexpected
jewels in an anthology, which I prepared some years
The Northern Muse.

Let me give you two other illustrations. There was a
fifteenth century English poet called John Lydgate, a disciple of
Chaucer and one of the prosiest of God's creatures. But Lydgate in
a love poem could write a verse like this .

"And as I stoode myself alloone upon the Nuwe Yere night,
I prayed unto the frosty moone, with her pale light,
To go and recomaunde me unto my lady dere.
And erly on the next morrowe, kneling in my cloos
I preyed eke the shene sonne, the houre whane he aroos,
To goon also and sey the same in his bemys clere."