with the too-late recognition and repentance--

See nations, slowly wise and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust.

The iniquity of it is accepted, proverbial, and goes back
even to legend, to Homer--

Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead
Through which the living Homer begged his bread ¹

--an epigram in all likelihood quite untrue to fact but
strictly true to human experience down to this day.

Now in accounting for this treatment of the Poet by his
fellow-citizens let me start by ruling out almost all that
the philosophers have said in his disparagement: and
this for two reasons; the first being that what they say is
untrue; the second that, whether true or not, it has
never in practice mattered. I suppose that never in
history has a Poet starved because a Philosopher said
he should. That the author of Venice Preserved in his
ravening hunger choked himself with a loaf charitably
bestowed by a passer-by cannot be laid at Plato's door
or imputed against any high-browed frequenter of the
low-browed roof of Socrates. We need not consent with
Goldsmith's Chinaman, Lien Chi Altangi, Citizen of
the World--'You see, my friend, there is nothing so
ridiculous that it has not at some time been said by some

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