"Remnant of Honour, brooding in the dark,
Over your bitter cark,
Staring, as Rizpah stared, astonied seven days,
Upon the corpses of so many sons
Who loved her once,
Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways,
Who could have dreamt
That times should come like these?"
Those are a few of the bitter lines about England which abound in "The Unknown Eros, and other Odes."
Among books to possess—books to be bought, begged, or stolen, pleasant to look at, pleasant to dip into, and useful to refer to, we give a place in the front rank to Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, by William Barnes (C. Kegan Paul & Co.), and nobody will dispute this award. Many of these poems are familiar upon the tongue, or laid up silent-sweet in the memory of hundreds of world-weary Cockneys, who never set eyes on a Dorset vale, and probably never will. Mr. Barnes writes a modest and characteristic preface explaining that two of these three Collections of rural poems had long been out of print (we are glad to hear it), and also calling attention to the glossary at the end of the volume, "with some hints on Dorset word-shapes." Mr. Barnes is past reviewing, and we will only add that this complete collection (467 pages) forms a handsome and well-printed volume, and is altogether a thing to be delightedly thankful for.
Titles often prove misleading things, and it is not often that the outside of any book gives the faintest hint of its quality, unless it tells you, or nearly tells you, the publisher's name, for of course there are publishers who very rarely issue bad, or even weak books. Memories: a Life's Epilogue. New Edition. With a Lament for Princess Alice. This is so very unpromising a title-page that if it had not been for the names, Longmans, Green & Co. at the foot of it, we might well have begun to turn over the leaves with some prejudice against the anonymous author. But a very casual glance informs the reader, in this case, that he has to deal with a highly intelligent man of the old school, with plenty of caustic humour in him. The author appears to be a gentleman advanced in years, and the "Memoirs" consist of recollections of incidents in his father's life and his own, going back at least as far as the days of Cribb and Molyneux, and taking in some pleasant scenes of Continental travel. There is something exceedingly quaint, almost ludicrous, in the author's way of employing the Spenserian stanza, and as it is not always clear that he is conscious of the humour there is in it, the reader's attention is kept on the alert in the very last way that would commend itself to a critic:—
"The matron of the house obligingly
Led him to two large rooms on the first floor,
Where he would have more light and liberty,
With a good walk along the corridor;
Besides which, they expected one or more
Nice gentlemen to-morrow afternoon.
The gentleman who left the day before—
Poor man! he had a cough would kill him soon—
Ten months he had been with them on the twelfth of June."
This is certainly odd, and the puzzle is that though the author, as we have said, has true and biting humour in him, he never drives his stanza with the conscious lilt that you find in, for example, Byron's use of a substantially kindred measure in "Beppo," or "Morgante Maggiore." Take the first lines that occur to one's mind in the latter:—
"There being a want of water in the place,
Orlando, like a trusty brother, said,
Morgante, I could wish you in this case
To go for water. You shall be obeyed," &c.
Here Byron is making the flat prose of the metre (so to speak), a source of humour in itself: but we cannot find that the author of these "Memories" intends anything of the kind. We agree with some of our brethren in finding the occasional lyrics good, and the opening lines of the seventh canto contain hints of genuine poetic quality. Altogether the book is a noticeable budget of gossip in verse, with not a few strong, pointed passages to relieve the effect of the flat or weak pages; which latter are, to speak the truth, too numerous. We should guess the author to be a very "clubable man."