Page:Songs of the Road Doyle.djvu/116

Rh The stolen fame of twenty smaller men?

You prate about my learning. I would urge

My want of learning rather as a proof

That I am still myself. Have I not traced

A seaboard to Bohemia, and made

The cannons roar a whole wide century

Before the first was forged? Think you, then,

That he, the ever-learned Verulam,

Would have erred thus? So may my very faults

In their gross falseness prove that I am true,

And by that falseness gender truth in you.

And what is left? They say that they have found

A script, wherein the writer tells my Lord

He is a secret poet. True enough!

But surely now that secret is o'er past.