Show LOST LOSI LITERATURE Kipling Kipling's Recessional was rescued from th the waste-basket waste b by Mrs l KiplinG Kipling Kip Kip- ling lint The TIme London Spectator not lon long iong ago told a similar stor story o of Tennyson's beautiful In The Th Brook The poet It seems after writing th the tho lyric did not like It it and was just about to throw It Into the fire lire when his friend Mr Ir Edward ley asked permission permission sion slon to look at It ft Mr l naturally naturally nat mint orally strongly advised Its publication publication tion but he found It Jt no ens easy matter to convince the poet that the tIme lyric was worth preserving Vho lio tocla today does hoes not remember the I lyric And who can quote offhand even th the substance sub of oC the thc remainder of the poem How man many a masterpiece may have h been created and antl destroyed and the world none the wiser The Time Brook Drook was saved sa and the Recessional but those narrow escapes do O not assure us that Kipling and Tennyson rennyson never consigned consigned con con- signed good work to the flames when no one was at nt hand han to rescue It It Authors Authors Authors Auth Auth- ors are commonly poor judges of their heir own work ork as beginners the they overestimate overestimate overes ovens its value That is one reason why editors are arc necessary Is It Unlikely unlikely un Un- HI likely el that in Inverse ratio to the growth of or a poets poet's skill an and power powel his sense of or the shortcomings in his work becomes keener One can cnn I Keats Koats pats In anguish over o a flaw liaw In a sonnet sonnet son SOIl net though to others the might be Invisible Keats would certainly destroy that sonnet onnet If he could not mal make e it pl please him Literatures Literature's greatest known losses losse have ha been due for COl the most part to external causes Soldiery Soldier the mob the tho torch torch Indifference Indifference or em fanatical objection these objection these have o destroyed so much that that one almost denies enies the time optimism optimism op tip- of the poets poet's There never ne was one lost good Ve Yo have havo but seven of at the seventy dramas which Aeschylus lus wrote seven of the hundred or 01 more b by Sophocles nineteen of ot the two ninety b by Euripides The remainIng remain remain- Ing lug fragments of at Sappho's verse are scarcely more than enough to tantalize tantalize tanta tanta- lize us During the siege of or Alexandria Alexandria Alexan Alexan- dria dna by Julius Caesar the library was burned with its more than four our bundred hundred hundred hun bun dred thousand During the reformation Irreparable losses to i literature resulted from Cram the thc plunderIng plunder- plunder Ing ng of monasteries A servant ser of or Warburton's lighted fires with manuscripts manu manu- scripts of or sixty five imprinted plays b by Massinger Ford Decker Robert G Greene Chapman an and Thomas Middleton U Heywoo s 's Lives of the Poets has disappeared Sir Thomas Newtons Newton's dog tipped over a acan can candle le which set fire to the time paper containing con- con taming th time the results of his labors In his declining years Several Seral pages would not hold nil all the Instances that might be named nan I |