it is overwhelmed by the public ignorance of all things Indian. Captain Grant Duffs' History of the Mahrattas' contains a description of the advance of the Peshwa's army on the morning of the Battle of Kirkee which, for charm of literary skill, it is difficult to match, but which is just too elaborate for quotation. Instead we will quote his friend's account of a Mahratta charge. Mountstuart Elphinstone had himself admired the magnificence of the Mahratta onset, had witnessed the thunder of the ground, the flashing of their arms, the brandishing of their spears, the agitation of their banners rushing through the wind.'

In our own generation Mr. Ruskin is among the. most melodious of prose writers. One of Mr. Ruskin's happiest efforts is a description of Southern Italy:

Silent villages, earthquake-shaken, without commerce, without industry, without knowledge, without hope, gleam in white ruin from hillside to hillside; far-winding wrecks of immemorial walls surround the dust of cities long forsaken; the mountain streams moan through the cold arches of their foundations, green with weed, and rage over the heaps of their fallen towers. Far above in thunder-blue serration stand the eternal edges of the angry Apennine, dark with rolling impendence of volcanic cloud.

A man who has written a passage such as this may claim to be forgiven any number of literary weaknesses and follies.

To write of melodious prose and not to quote from Newman or Carlyle seems an anomaly. The clear and liquid cadences of the one and the picturesque magnificence of the other have on some ears an effect hardly to be obtained from any other writing. To illustrate these

K

qualities one has only to recall the passage on music from the University Sermons' or the close of the 'Life of Sterling.' A reference to the enchantments of the style of either passage must, however, suffice.

Among the orators of our time Mr. Bright alone can claim to have produced melodious prose. The perorations of his speeches are indeed distinguished by a

remarkable sweetness of cadence.

So inadequate and so hasty an attempt to exhibit by quotation the melody of English prose seems to need some apology. Let us hope that those who know and love our literature will not be displeased to see the favourites of their reading quoted as they have been here; and that they will pardon the omissions and the rejections. In one respect at least our inquiry cannot be distasteful, for it serves to remind us how splendid, how wide, and how various is the field of English prose.

131

WILLIAM BARNES

THE Rev. William Barnes (known, where he was known at all, as the Dorsetshire Poet'), though he died at the age of ninety, cannot be said to have outlived his fame, for fame, in the sense of popularity or worldly applause, he never attained. A little notoriety as the quaint preserver of an English dialect he no doubt did at one time achieve; and a little curiosity among those who hunt for literary oddities was excited by the poet of the West Country vicarage who poured out from a full heart the love songs of a peasantry just losing their own character and sinking to the dull level of the English 'lower class.' Beyond this his general reputation has not reached.

But though fame, in the sense of a recognition wide and popular, was not gained by Mr. Barnes, he nevertheless obtained for his songs what was to him perhaps more valued and more coveted-first, the appreciation of the simple folk among whom he lived, and then the sincere praise of that small circle of readers of verse who, though they cannot give popularity, yet know the true gold of poetry, and whose applause, once secured, ensure that the poet's works shall never utterly die. William Barnes's verse will always find an echo in the heart that is really open to the poet's voice. He is not

a poet because he writes in dialect; not merely noteworthy because he seized on what was beautiful in peasant life and expressed it in song. He, like Burns must have been a poet, in whatever language he had written, and whatever had been his theme. It happened that to the one the tongue of the Scotch Lowlands, to the other that of Dorsetshire and the West, was native; but both are poets by a tenure, if not as great, at least as free and as secure as that of Shakespeare himself.

The Dorsetshire poet, again, like Burns, did not put on his dialect to sing in. It was the language of his daily life. In it he preached to the villagers in the parish church. In it he thought and spoke just as did the men and women with whom he mixed and with whom he peopled his songs.

To certain people, no doubt, the 'z's' and 'w's' of the poems simply cause a laugh. To them the refrain 'Lwonesome woodlands! zunny woodlands!' or 'They evenèns in the twilight' are nothing but ridiculous. To others the poems are merely a closed book. They see that some spirit of song is awake in the verses, but they cannot catch the music. The words are harsh and strange, and they dread the effort necessary to break through the hard rind and reach the mellow fruit within; and very naturally, for the effort to like or understand is the death of pleasure. With the first class, the people who simply find the 'Poems of Rural Life' laughable, it is useless to argue. We can only exclaim, with the despairing diplomatist obliged to associate with a minister more than ordinarily thick-headed, pompous, and opinionated—' Il est impossible de causer avec un monsieur comme ça,' It is not, however, mere waste of

breath to try to get the others—those who think they cannot understand the dialect, and are terrified by it as they are by broad Scotch-to see his beauties.

The two especial merits of William Barnes's poetry, beyond its extreme dexterity of handling, grace and felicity of expression, and unforced music, are the wonderfully truthful painting of West Country scenery and the tenderness, the pathos, and the joy echoing delight with which he touches the loves and sorrows of simple country folk. To show the quality of his verse by quotation is almost impossible. It is necessary to read widely to feel the full enchantment of his numbers. The first stanza of the poem called 'The Love Child' is exquisite in its quiet simplicity :—

Where the bridge out at Woodley did stride

Wi' his wide arches' cool, sheäded bow,

Up above the clear brook that did slide
By the popples befoamed white as snow :
As the gilcups did quiver among

The deäsies a-spread in a sheet,

There a quick-trippèn maid come along

Aye, a girl wi' her light-steppèn veet.

It is almost an insult to set up a sign-post to the beauties of such a poem. Yet how faithful, how enchanting is the picture called before us! Anyone who knows the West of England, and can picture the streams of Somersetshire or Dorsetshire, can call to mind just such a scene. The wide red sandstone arch, spanning the clear and shallow brook that runs away among the stones, and the flower-starred meadows on each hand, all rise before us in the poet's verse. How masterly and how certain of touch is the art that makes the