CONTEMPORARY ANGLO-CELTIC POETS (MANX)
THOMAS EDWARD BROWN.
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Was born at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, in 1830. After a career of exceptional distinction at Oxford, he was appointed Vice-Principal of King William’s College in the Isle of Man (1855). Since 1863 he has been assistant-master of Clifton College. The book by which Mr Brown is best known is his admirable Fo’c’sle Yarns (Macmillan, 1881 and 1889), though the first of his tales in verse included therein, “Betsy Lee,” appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1873 where it at once attracted wide attention. He has also published The Doctor (1887) and The Manx Witch (1889). The author of Fo’c’sle Yarns is by far the most noteworthy poetic representative of the Isle of Man. In range, depth of insight, dramatic vigour, keen sympathy, and narrative faculty, all transformed by the alchemy of his poetic vision, he is not only the foremost Manx poet, but one of the most notable of living writers in verse. It is probably because most of his poems deal almost wholly with Manx scenes and characters, and are for the most part written in the Manx dialect, that he is so little talked of by literary critics and so little known to the reading world at large. Than “Betsy Lee” (Fo’c’sle Yarns) there is no more moving, human, and beautiful poem, of the narrative kind, written in our time. The fragmentary lines by which the author is represented here were selected from one of his most characteristic Manx poems, and give a good idea of the common parlance of the islanders of to-day. It is from The Doctor: and Other Poems (Swan Sonnenschein, 1887).
HALL CAINE.
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This fine Manx ballad of “Graih my Chree” appeared this year in the first number of London Home, to the editor and proprietor of which, as well as to Mr Hall Caine, I am indebted for the permission to include “Love of my Heart” here. Mr Caine, so celebrated as a novelist, has published no volume of poems; but at rare intervals something of his in verse has appeared. I think that his earliest appearance as a poet was in Sonnets of this Century (1886, and later editions), where he is represented by two fine sonnets, “Where Lies the Land to which my Soul would go?” and “After Sunset.” Mr Caine’s own first acknowledged book was an anthology of sonnets (Sonnets of Three Centuries, Stock, 1882), published in the author’s twenty-seventh year. Of his many books, the best known are his Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and his romances, The Shadow of a Crime, The Deemster, The Bondman, The Scapegoat, and The Manxman. Mr Hall Caine is himself a Manxman, crossed with a strong strain of Cumberland blood. Both in his strength and weakness he is eminently Celtic, after his own kind; for he could belong to no other Celtic people than either the Manx or the Welsh. He has, and not without good reason, been called the Walter Scott of Man. Certainly, The Deemster and The Manxman alone have revealed Manxland and Manx life and character to the great mass of English readers.