The Vicar had taken a great fancy to the new schoolmaster. Joyce’s love of books was in itself a passport to Mr. Dulcimer’s favour. He invited the young man to spend an evening with him occasionally, and Emmanuel revelled in long hours of talk upon far-reaching questions--conversations from which Mr. Dulcimer let himself slip insensibly into a monologue, and poured forth his stores of curious uncatalogued knowledge. In one thing only he was rather hard upon the aspiring student. He set his face strongly against Emmanuel’s poetic efforts. ‘They are as good as most of the prize poems it has been my lot to read,’ he said, after he had conscientiously gone through Emmanuel’s little collection of manuscript verses, ‘but then you see a prize poem is generally the flattest thing in life. As intellectual efforts they do you credit, and as mental training I’ve no doubt the composition of them has been serviceable to you. But I will not be so weak as to say go on writing verses. There are about twenty poets born in a century, and about twenty thousand rhymesters. Shall a wise man waste his life--his brief precious sum of days and hours--in labouring to develop the rhymester into the poet? Why, the poet knows himself for a poet before he is twenty. The man upon whom that mantle has fallen, the man who is born to wear that crown, cannot be mistaken about himself. Look at Pope, Chatterton, Shelley, Byron, Keats--boy poets all. And is a man who has not put forth that supreme flower of genius in his youth to go on cudgelling his brain for rhymes, in the hope that labour will make him a poet? It is the stuff behind the rhymes that is wanting in him. He has nothing to say. But he thinks if he can say nothing melodiously--to somebody else’s tune--that he may make himself a poet. Wasted labour, idle delusion. Go into philosophy, natural science, criticism, history--anything you like, my dear young friend--the field is wide, and in these studies a man can make himself. God makes poets.’ Emmanuel took the lesson to heart, humiliating as it was. For a long time he had hugged the idea that he was a poet. That electro-plated verse of his, modelled upon the verse of other singers, had for his deluded ear the ring of genuine silver. Granted that there were only twenty poets born in a century. It seemed to him no less hard that he could not be one of the twenty. He had no pity for the nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine versifiers, self-deluded like himself, and doomed to disappointment as bitter.