h it is a serious task only to get
out of its wrappers and open in two or three places, is on the whole of
so good an average quality. The dead level of mediocrity is in these
days a table-land, a good deal above the old sea-level of laboring
incapacity. Sixty years ago verses made a local reputation, which
verses, if offered today to any of our first-class magazines, would go
straight into the waste-basket. To write "poetry" was an art and mystery
in which only a few noted men and a woman or two were experts.

When "Potter the ventriloquist," the predecessor of the well-remembered
Signor Blitz, went round giving his entertainments, there was something
unexplained, uncanny, almost awful, and beyond dispute marvellous, in his
performances. Those watches that disappeared and came back to their
owners, those endless supplies of treasures from empty hats, and
especially those crawling eggs that travelled all over the magician's
person, sent many a child home thinking that Mr. Potter must have ghostly
assistants, and raised grave doubts in the minds of "professors," that is
members of the church, whether they had not compromised their characters
by being seen at such an unhallowed exhibition. Nowadays, a clever boy
who has made a study of parlor magic can do many of those tricks almost
as well as the great sorcerer himself. How simple it all seems when we
have seen the mechanism of the deception!

It is just so with writing in verse. It was not understood that
everybody can learn to make poetry, just as they can learn the more
difficult tricks of juggling. M. Jourdain's discovery that he had been
speaking and writing prose all his life is nothing to that of the man who
finds out in middle life, or even later, that he might have been writing
poetry all his days, if he had only known how perfectly easy and simple
it is. Not everybody, it is true, has a sufficiently good ear, a
sufficient knowledge of rhymes and capacity for handling them, to be what
is called a poet. I doubt whether more than nine out of ten, in the
average, have that combination of gifts required for the writing of
readable verse.

This last expression of opinion created a sensation among The Teacups.
They looked puzzled for a minute. One whispered to the next Teacup,
"More than nine out of ten! I should think that was a pretty liberal
allowance."

Yes, I continued; perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred would come nearer to
the mark. I have sometimes thought I