Till lately, however, I have felt a difficulty
in the matter, for, to tell the truth, these deeply moving words came in
the first place not from some classical writer but from that nautical
ditty, "Tom Bowling." They are the work of that amazing British Tyrteus
Dibdin,--the broken-down poet actor who drew an annual salary from the
Admiralty for maintaining the spirit of the British Navy through his
songs! ["_We 'ires a poet for ourselves_" was, according to Byron,
the boast of Mr. Rowland of oily fame. The Admiralty could make a
similar claim.]
I felt that it would be rather much to ask one's executor to get a
country vicar to pass a line of a nautical ditty for insertion in a
church. If, in verifying the quotation, the parson should be arrested by
the neighbouring line, "_His Poll was kind and true_," what then?
There is no harm in the poem as a whole but somehow it has not quite the
monumental air about it. Lately, however, I discovered to my great
satisfaction and not a little to my amusement that, as so often happens,
one of the Greeks of the great age had been before Dibdin. In that
enchanting dialogue, "The Symposium" of Xenophon, Hermogenes is asked by
one of the persons of the dialogue: "On what do you plume yourself most
highly?" "_On the virtue and the power of my friends_," he
answered, "_and that being what they are, they care for me_.
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