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Updated: June 15, 2025
The Poet Laureate builds his house on the top of Boar's Hill not because the soil is specially productive up there so that he may be able to grow food, for the soil is rather poor; not because water is easily available, for it is very difficult to get, as he found when his house took fire; not because of the climate, for the climate is just as good a hundred feet lower down; not because it is easily accessible to Oxford, for a big climb up the hill is entailed every time he returns from that city not for any of these reasons did he build his house there, but because of the view which he obtains from that spot.
Daniel was no otherwise Laureate than his position in the queen's household may authorize that title. If ever so entitled by contemporaries, it was quite in a Pickwickian and complimentary sense.
It is grounded in certain leading characters, men and women, conceived upon models of extraordinary grandeur; and as the Laureate has evidently grasped the genuine law which makes man and not the acts of man the base of epic song, we should not be surprised were he hereafter to realize the great achievement towards which he seems to be feeling his way.
"Nay, I have only served thee as a crowned Laureate should ever serve a lesser minstrel," he said, with that indescribably delicious air of self-flattery which was so whimsical, and yet so winning, "And I tell thee in all good faith that, for a newly arrived visitor in Al-Kyris, thy first venture was a reckless one!
With the accompaniment of a tremendous crowd, great heat, and thunders of applause, the prize poems were read, and the medals distributed by the Prince. Then came the time for the "Installation Ode," written at the Prince's request by Wordsworth, the poet laureate, set to music, and sung in Trinity Hall in the presence of the Queen and Prince Albert with great effect.
Croker's sharp common-sense at once suggested the abolition of the Laureate duties, but the retention of the office as a sinecure. Walter Scott, to whom the place was offered, as the most popular of living poets, seconded the counsel of Croker, but declined the appointment, as beneath the dignity of the intended founder of a long line of border knights. He recommended Southey.
Poet, probably b. in Ayrshire, was in the service of the Regent Morton and James VI., by whom he was pensioned. He is sometimes styled "Captain," and was laureate of the Court. He appears to have fallen on evil days, was imprisoned on the Continent, and lost his pension.
As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful lack of everything but overwork.
A kind friend, it is said, still continued to pay him the two hundred pounds he had received as Poet Laureate, and he now wrote more plays which brought him money. Then, thus late in life, he began the work which for you at present will have the greatest interest. Dryden was a great poet, but he could create nothing, he had to have given him ideas upon which to work.
Some of the costumes I have suggested might appear a little more difficult to carry out. The attire of a person prepared to criticise the Poet Laureate is something so awful and striking that I dare not even begin to describe it; the one fact which I am willing to reveal, and to state seriously and responsibly, is that it buttons up behind.
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