A CAST.
Ghillie. "Ay, Sir, the fushers are no what they were. Ye'll maybe no believe me, but there was a man here last month that had naething but a sup o' cold tea in his flask to wet a fush when he caught yin!"
THE PARADISE OF BARDS.
(From an Oxford Correspondent.)
Considerable resentment has been caused in various centres of poetic activity by the preference recently expressed by the Prime Minister for the products of Welsh minstrelsy. In a letter addressed to Huw Menai, the working South Wales miner poet, Mr. Lloyd George declares that he has read his poems with the "greatest delight." If the Premier had merely said "great delight" no untoward consequences would have ensued, but the invidious use of the superlative threatens to embroil the whole country in that internecine war recently predicted by the Editor of The Athenæum in his gloomy survey of Neo-Georgian literature.
Meetings of protest have been held in Hampstead, at Letchworth, Stratford-on-Avon and the Eustace Miles Restaurant, but the most remarkable and orderly of these demonstrations was that which took place at Boar's Hill on Saturday last, under the presidency of the Poet Laureate. Boar's Hill, we need not remind our readers, is par excellence the fashionable intellectual suburb of Oxford, and has been called the "Paradise of Bards." Dr. Bridges in a brief opening address, speaking more in sorrow than in anger, dealt with the statistical side of the question. He pointed out that of the residents at Boar's Hill one in every six was a true poet, and three out of every five were masters of the art of prosody. There were no miner poets on Boar's Hill. Their motto was Majora canamus.
Professor Gilbert Murray, who followed, laid stress on the perfect harmony which reigned amongst the residents, in spite of the fact that all schools of poetry were represented, from the austerest of classicists to the most advanced exponents of Neo-Georgian vers libre. They were a happy family, linked together by a common devotion to the Muses, and in their daily output of verse showing a higher unit of production than that recorded of any other community in either hemisphere.
Mr. John Masefield moved the only resolution, which was carried unanimously, to the effect that Mr. Fisher, the Minister of Education, should be requested to convey to the Prime Minister the regret of the meeting that he should have overlooked the paramount claim of Boar's Hill to be regarded as the Parnassus of Great Britain. In Murray's Guide to Oxfordshire it had been spoken of as "a health resort for jaded students," but that was an obsolete libel. Constitutionally vigorous and daily refreshed by draughts from the pellucid springs of the Pierides, they led a life of exuberant health, as the vital statistics of the neighbourhood would abundantly show. On Boar's Hill people began to write poetry earlier and continued to do so later than in any other spot in the British Isles.
Sir Arthur Evans, in proposing a vote of thanks to the Chairman, made the gratifying announcement that Mr. Masefield was already engaged on a companion poem to his "Reynard the Fox," commemorating the genius loci under the inspiring title of "The Sticking of the Pig."