"After fifteen years' observation of the poorer classes of English folk, chiefly in London and the south, I am pretty well assured that, whatever civilising agencies may be at work among the democracy, poetry is not one of them. Reading, of one kind or another, is universal; study, serious and progressive, is no longer confined to the ranks that enjoy a liberal education; but the populace, the industrial and trading masses, not merely remain without interest in poetry, but do not so much as understand what the term poetry means. In other intellectual points, the grades of unlettered life are numerous; as regards appreciation of verse, the People are one. From the work-girl, with her penny novelette, to the artisan who has collected a little library, the natural inclination of all who represent their class is to neglect verse as something exotic, something without appeal to their instincts. They either do not read it at all--the common case--or (with an exception to be noticed) they take it as a quaint variety of prose, which custom has consecrated to religion, to the affections, and to certain phases of facetiousness. "In London, through all orders of society below the liberally educated, it is a most exceptional thing to meet with a person who seeks for verse as verse; who recognises the name of any greater poet not hackneyed in the newspapers, or who even distantly apprehends the nature of the poet's art. In the north of England, where more native melody is found, self-taught readers of poetry are, I believe, not so rare; but they must still be greatly the exception. As to the influence of board-schools, one cannot doubt that the younger generation are even less inclined to a taste for poetry than their fathers. Some elderly people, in Sunday languor, take up a book of verse with which they have been familiar since early days (Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Montgomery, Longfellow); whereas their children cannot endure printed matter cut into rhythmic lengths, unless the oddity solicit them in the columns of a paper specially addressed to their intelligence.