Mr. Gosse delivered his last Clark lecture, on "Naturalism in.
English Poetry," in the hall of Trinity College last Saturday, closing his proper subject with a telling panegyric on Keats, who in only twenty-four years of life had written what "holds its place with the verse of Shakespeare and Milton." Mr. Gosse concluded by congratulating his audience that the Clark lecture had not been made "a wheel in the great machine of University instruction," and that English literature is not a subject on which undergraduates or graduates are "examined." Mr. Gosse held with Mr. Balfour that reading should be regarded rather as a pleasure than a duty, and treated poetry as a subject that should refresh and relieve the overstrained intelligence of the student, rather than as a new theme on which that intelligence should be strained and tested. "Long may our local ortolans be saved," said Mr. Gosse, "from being violently stuffed with crumbs from Addison and Cowper !" We agree with the sentiment, but its expression seems to us to savour of a literary artificiality which does not augur very well for the freshness which Mr. Gosse so wisely desires to preserve. If, as the image suggests, the youthful student is improved in delicacy of flavour by Univer- sity stuffing, the richer flavour of a poetical stuffing will soon be turned to account by the intellectual epicure.
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