Questions at Issue by Edmund Gosse

_Centenary Address delivered at Horsham, August 11, 1892_

We meet to-day to celebrate the fact that, exactly one hundred years ago, there was born, in an old house in this parish, one of the greatest of the English poets, one of the most individual and remarkable of the poets of the world. This beautiful county of Sussex, with its blowing woodlands and its shining downs, was even then not unaccustomed to poetic honours. One hundred and thirty years before, it had given birth to Otway; seventy years before, to Collins. But charming as these pathetic figures were and are, not Collins and not Otway can compare for a moment with that writer who is the main intellectual glory of Sussex, the ever-beloved and ethereally illustrious Percy Bysshe Shelley. It has appeared to me that you might, as a Sussex audience, gathered in a Sussex town, like to be reminded, before we go any further, of the exact connection of our poet with the county -- of the stake, as it is called, which his family held in Sussex, and of the period of his own residence in it.