His Grace — page 217: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HIS GRACE. AS CHAPTER XVII. HURSTBOURNE HAS MANY WARNINGS. I HAD the effrontery to call myself a poet in the last paragraph of the last chapter, and I don’t know that my presumption was any the more excusable because I qualified it by the statement that I was a prosaic poet. I hasten to substitute the assertion that I am—or at least once was—a prosaic rhymester, which is a more intelligible definition than the other. What, I have sometimes wondered, are the constituent qualities of a true poet? I am not going to admit that facility of expression is one of them, because that may be acquired, readily in some cases, slowly and pain- fully in others, by everybody, just as everybody may learn to play the piano after a fashion. But I suppose that one essential attribute of the true poet is a certain insight into the byways of human nature which can never be learnt by the majority of his fellow-creatures, though many of them may be quite as well able as he to distin- guish black from white and A from B. Had I been gifted with as much of that faculty as was required for reading the not very recondite thoughts of such persons as Nora and Hurstbourne and Lady Deverell and Miss St. George, I should doubtless have felt less perturbed about them all than I did; but the more I reflected Eomichoo gS (E(0) m