“But, of course, that is quite an exception. Most things won’t stand anything but dialect, and I just give you this tip gratis. You can make anything individual and strong by odd spelling. It arrests the attention, and you haven’t got to pick your words. Did you ever read a beautiful work called _Colorado Bill; or, From Cowboy to President_? Well, I can assure you that when it was in English, before being turned into dialect, it was quite ordinary-like.” “But that ain’t all. One has now and then to strike a deeper note, and striking a deeper note is so simple, that I wonder it has not occurred to others of our poets. You have got to imagine yourself in a church, and you must read over your manuscript to yourself in that kind of hollow voice--you know what I mean.” I swore that I did. “_Now_, you see why one puts ‘ye’ for ‘you,’ and ‘ye be’ for ‘you are,’ and mentions the Law in so many words. It is not very difficult to do, and when one does succeed, one gets what I call A1 copper-bottomed poetry.” He went to a corner of the room, opened a large, scented, velvet-bound book upon a brass reading-desk, looked at me severely, coughed twice, and began as follows: “I am about to read you ‘In the Confessional.’ The greatest critic of the century has called this the greatest poem of the century. I begin at the third verse, and the seventeenth line:-- * * * * * “Lest he forget the great ally In heaven yclept hypocrisy, So help me Bawb! I’ll mark him yet-- Lest he forget! Lest he forget!” * * * * * He closed the book with becoming reverence. And there was a silence, during which the grand words went on running in my head as their author had meant them to do. “Lest he forget! Lest he forget!” Ah, may heaven preserve its darling poet, and never let him fall from the height of that great message. “Well,” said he, genially, anticipating my applause, “Good-bye. But before you go please let me beg you to tell the public that I lately wrote something for the _Times_ a great deal better than anything else I have ever written. Nobody seems to read the _Times_,” he continued, in a tone of slight petulance, “and I have not seen it quoted anywhere. I wonder if it is properly known? Please tell people that that little note about ‘copyright’ is only for fun. _Anyone_ may use it who likes--I had a paragraph put in the papers to say so. It’s like this--” He then added a few conventional words of God-speed, and I left him. I have never seen him since. And yet ... and yet....