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classes would supplement, not replace, the systematic ward work of the clinical clerks. The atmosphere of a great clinique of this type, presided over by an enthusiastic teacher and active investigator, is something quite different from that in which the average hospital physician lives and moves; the teaching is systematised, is better done, and is done by men trained for the purpose. Judged by the results of the final examinations of the Conjoint Board, the present teaching of London medical students is singularly ineffective. A system under which thirty-five to forty-five per cent. of the men who have been studying for five years, or more, fail to pass so fair an examination surely demands revision. The Commissioners speak of establishing special cliniques in three of the main divisions; but in every one of the specialties there should be cliniques of the same type, presided over by men who will devote a large part of their time to teaching and to the investigation of special diseases. The amount of clinical material available in London for this purpose is enormous. The best school of neurology in the country, that at the Queen's Square Hospital, could be made the rival of the Salpêtrière. There is room at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for two large cliniques for children's diseases, which would attract postgraduate students from all over the world. Psychiatry, Syphilis, Skin Diseases, Ophthalmology, Laryngology, etc., should all be represented by university departments at special hospitals. Post-graduate teaching will receive proper recognition. Colonial and home students wishing special instruction in any subjects, from Eugenics to Cardiac Physics, will be assigned to teachers with modern methods and equipment. At the smaller hospitals, not directly under the Faculty, physicians and surgeons of special merit will be accepted as extra-mural teachers and encouraged to come into competition with the official staff. The men are available, the clinical material is ample; but money and a strong central organisation are needed to carry the scheme into effect.

It is not only in London that the University must force its way into the hospitals. In the provinces, in Scotland and in Ireland modern cliniques are needed; in-breeding should be discouraged; and the teaching posts in the final subjects should be open to all. The

Universities should be able to seek the best men in an open market, which they cannot do until the hospital authorities and the Universities come together under new conditions. What happened a few years ago at Manchester in the Chair of Medicine is a hopeful sign; and the clinical schools should everywhere be as keen to seek out the best men as are the departments of anatomy, physiology or pathology. A new medical faculty in London, with the clinical chairs thrown open to competition, would set the pace and help to break down a system that has done much to retard the progress of medicine and surgery in this country.

It is hard to put new wine into old bottles; it is hard to organise an up-to-date Medical Faculty with the conditions at present prevailing in London; but it is not impossible. Wedded to the old order, some men are as oblivious of the changes going on about them as to the alterations they see daily in their glass but do not recognise. There is a new outlook in Medicine, and a new science is moulding both thought and practice. Vested interests are powerful, old associations and ways are strong, but stronger still, we hope, will be the public and professional opinion in favour of the changes suggested by the Commissioners. London should be the most important medical centre in the world. That it is not this, is due to lack of organisation and cohesion. To unite into a great Faculty its scattered forces is one aim of this able and far-reaching report, which will have the active support of all but those whom fear of change not only perplexes but appals.

Art. 12.-THE POETRY OF ROBERT BRIDGES.

1. Poetical Works of Robert Bridges, excluding the eight dramas. London: Henry Frowde, 1912.

2. Poetical Works of Robert Bridges. Vols. I to VI. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1898-1905.

ONE of the pleasantest features in the intellectual landscape of the moment is unquestionably the revival of poetry. Not that anyone who knew anything at all about poetry could suppose it would really die. It has had too many deaths, followed by too many resurrections, for that. We are now grown older and wiser than the people who, in the age of Spenser and the Elizabethan drama, declared poetry to be useless and provoked Sidney to write the 'Apology,' without which their very existence would be forgotten; or than Peacock, who, in the age of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, asserted that poetry was obsolete and absurd, and had the same good fortune as his obscurer predecessors by provoking a reply from Shelley which has saved his attack from total oblivion. All such fears have now passed away for ever from the minds of intelligent people. Criticism, which has often injured poetry, has now done for it the supreme service of showing the essential eternity of its nature. It has taught us to see in poetry the highest and most permanently satisfying of all interpretations of life, a thing which has the potentiality of being as many-coloured, as transcendental, as infinite and therefore as immortal as life itself. So long as man lives he will have an ear, a mind, an imagination and a spirit; and all four, especially if, as we may hope, they gradually develope in power, will more and more claim poetry as the only food which they can partake in common, and in the strength of which they realise their unity in themselves and their hold on ultimate and immutable truth.

This being so, believers in poetry were not likely to be led away by the voices which, after the deaths of Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne, proclaimed that English poetry was dead in their graves. Nor are they likely to be taken by surprise by the present revival. This, like everything else in a democratic age, seems at

present to be more remarkable for extent and size than for distinction. But we need not quarrel with that. The thing is genuine; the stuff is honest poetic material, not shoddy; and if some of the treatment tends at present to give us a kind of rhetorical realism in place of that musical and imaginative interpretation of life which is poetry, that is not unnatural in an age dominated by melodramatic journalism; and will pass away as those who practise it learn its emptiness by experience. Even if these defects were more marked than they are, they would afford no reason for failing to rejoice in the fact that poetry now makes monthly magazines go into second editions; that it has established a book-shop of its own, selling nothing but its own wares, a thing probably unknown before on this, hitherto, mainly prosaic earth; that it has issued a volume of Georgian poetry' which includes nothing published before the accession of George V ; finally that it has now established a quarterly review devoted solely to poetry and the discussion of poetry. All these things are of the best omen; they mean that the young poets believe in themselves and have found a public which believes in them too.

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But in poetry, as in life itself, there are no absolutely new departures. The new which is to live is rooted in the old and knows that it is. So these young poets-and it is not the least interesting fact about them-have dedicated their volume, not to some revolutionary critic who flatters them by saying that they are the people and that wisdom was born with them, but to the most scholarly of English poets, to the intensely Etonian and Oxonian Robert Bridges. In him they rightly recognise the greatest living master of their art in this country, and at his feet they lay their work, an offering which does as much honour to them as to him. Mr Bridges has been as careful, not to say perverse, in avoiding fame as other men are in seeking for it but even he must, we should suppose, take some pleasure in this striking tribute from his young fellow-craftsmen, poets so unlike him, and yet so like in that likeness which obliterates all unlikeness, in the sincere love and earnest practice of the greatest of the arts.

Only a few months after the appearance of this significant dedication, an event occurred which gives it a

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special interest. The death of Mr Alfred Austin leaves the office of Poet Laureate vacant. That office, if it is to be continued at all on the present lines, demands from its holder certain special gifts which many great poets have not possessed. Mr Austin was not a great poet; he had neither the high imagination nor the large utterance of the great poets. But he had in abundance some of the qualifications which the Laureate needs. The poet who is to speak in verse for the whole nation, almost as the Sovereign or the Prince of Wales may occasionally speak for it in prose, must be a patriot, proud of his country, full of pride in her past and faith in her future. He must be something of a politician at least to the extent of believing, as poets have not always believed, in the greatness of political issues; and he must accept, and indeed honour, the traditions of his country. These gifts are the indispensable outfit of the Laureate; and they were as clearly possessed by Mr Austin as they were lacking to greater men, like Shelley, for instance, or Blake. And he added other gifts almost equally desirable for the part it fell to him to play. The strongest and perhaps the best thing in him was his genuine love of all that is specially English in meadow, wood and garden, English birds and trees and flowers. And the type of humanity in which he saw his ideal was also one that was obviously built on very English lines. All these things, which for some other purposes might be weaknesses, were sources of strength for the Laureateship, and though neither they nor the title of Laureate could raise a mediocre poet out of his mediocrity, they did give him the best possible field for the powers he had.

His death leaves the office vacant, with no obvious successor marked out by universal opinion. Some suggest that the opportunity should be taken to abolish a post which has become an anachronism. But that is not the English manner of dealing with anachronisms. We do not abolish; we transform. The King may no longer wish for a versifier to present him with complimentary odes on his birthday; but the poet is still the greatest of all national voices, and both King and nation may well desire to speak through him. If this be so, it will scarcely do to abandon the official and political position of the Laureate, and make the title a mere compliment to

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