unwisely from 'Count Julian,' in the footnotes to this version of the same story. One is the line on him who stands and sees the flames above the towers 'Spire, with a bitter and severe delight'; and the other on him 'whose hills Touch the last cloud upon the level sky.' In those lines something speaks, which is not the voice of prose; but in all 'Roderick' (can we say in all Southey?) nothing which is not the voice of prose. When I ask myself if there is not in all Southey's work in verse anything which might not as well have been written in prose, I find myself hesitating a little over one section of that work, a section in which homely quaintness is sometimes combined with a grotesque or ironical humour. 'Take my word for it, Sir,' said Mr. Edgworth to Southey, 'the bent of your genius is for comedy'; and I think Mr. Edgworth was right. There is real metrical fun in 'The Cataract of Lodore,' and in "The Old Woman of Berkeley' a real mastery of the gruesome. In the verses on 'The Holly Tree' there is a certain measure, and in the verses written in his library there is more, of a pungent homeliness, through which for once the real man seems to speak, and to speak straight. But better than any of these, because it combines in one the best of their qualities, is 'The Battle of Blenheim,' where the irony is at once naïve and profound, and where the extreme simplicity of the form is part of the irony. All the other poems may be compared with other better things of the same kind, as 'The Cataract of Lodore' with 'The Bells' and 'The Old Woman of Berkeley' with "The Witch of Fyfe'; but in this poem Southey is himself, and no one has done a better poem of the kind. It is a poem of the pedestrian sort, but it is good of its sort. Southey's talent was pedestrian, and it was his misfortune that he tried to fly, with wings made to order, and on his own pattern, and a misfit. ROBERT TANNAHILL (1774-1810) 1 ROBERT TANNAHILL was born at Paisley in 1774, and worked at the loom all his life, making up his songs as he worked, and fitting new words to old tunes. Ill-health and disappointment seem to have turned him melancholy-mad, and after burning all his manuscripts he drowned himself in the river in the year 1810. He left a local fame which has spread, although the editor of his poems says naïvely: 'They do not interest the readers so much as he seems to have expected.' His own attitude was unnecessarily humble, and he apologised for his work as 'the effusions of an unlettered mechanic, whose hopes, as a poet, extend no further than to be reckoned respectable among the minor bards of his country.' His songs are written spontaneously, often with real felicities of phrase, and almost always with a natural knack for that almost inarticulate jingle and twinkle which goes with the genuine gallop of the Scottish tongue. Like all writers who are neither lettered nor unlettered he is not always sure of his own limits, and does not realise what he loses by leaving his 'bonnie woods and braes' for an unrealised world where 'Vengeance drives his crimson car.' The sentimentality of the moment, sad or joyous, rarely goes deep enough to retain any permanent heat in songs, improvised with natural skill, and never better than when they are savoured with petulance or homely humour. 'I RECKON myself a dab at prose-verse I leave to my betters,? Lamb once wrote to Wordsworth; and, in a letter to Charles 1 (1) Poems, 1807. (2) Works, 1838, 1873. 1 (1) Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798. (2) John Woodvil, 1802. (3) Works, 2 vols., the first containing collected poems, 1818. (4) Album Verses, 1830. (5) Poetical Works, 1836. Lloyd, he tells him, by way of praise, 'your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose.' 'Those cursed Dryads and Pagan trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit of the very name of poetry,' he has just said. At the age of twentyone he talks of giving up the writing of poetry. 'At present,' he writes to Coleridge, ‘I have not leisure to write verses, nor anything approaching to a fondness for the exercise. . . The music of poesy may charm for awhile the importunate teasing cares of life; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make that music.' Yet, as we know, Lamb, who had begun with poetry, returned to the writing of poetry at longer or shorter intervals throughout his whole life: was this prose-writer, in whom prose partook so much of the essence of poetry, in any real or considerable sense a poet? The name of Lamb as a poet is known to most people as the writer of one poem. 'The Old Familiar Faces' is scarcely a poem at all; the metre halts, stumbles, there is no touch of magic in it; but it is speech, naked human speech, such as rarely gets through the lovely disguise of verse. It has the raw humanity of Walt Whitman, and almost hurts us by a kind of dumb helplessness in it. A really articulate poet could never have written it; here, the emotion of the poet masters him as he speaks; and you feel, with a strange thrill, that catch in his breath which he cannot help betraying. There are few such poems in literature, and no other in the work of Lamb. For Lamb, with his perfect sincerity, his deliberate and quite natural simplicity, and with all that strange tragic material within and about him (already coming significantly into the naïve prose tale of 'Rosamund Gray'), was unable to work directly upon that material in the imaginative way of the poet, unable to transform its substance into a creation in the form of verse. He could write about it, touchingly sometimes, more or less tamely for the most part, in a way that seems either too downright or too deliberate. 'Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge,' he wrote, with his unerring tact of advice, 'or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression. I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.' This simplicity, which was afterwards to illuminate his prose, is seen in his verse almost too nakedly, or as if it were an end rather than a means. Lamb's first master was Cowper, and the method of Cowper was not a method that could ever help him to be himself. But, above all, verse itself was never as much of a help to him as it was a hindrance. Requiring always, as he did, to apprehend reality indirectly, and with an elaborately prepared ceremony, he found himself in verse trying to be exactly truthful to emotions too subtle and complex for his skill. He could but set them down as if describing them, as in most of that early work in which he took himself and his poetry most seriously. What was afterwards to penetrate his prose, giving it that savour which it has, unlike any other, is absent from his almost saltless verse. There is the one inarticulate cry, 'The Old Familiar Faces,' and then, for twenty years and more, only one or two wonderful literary exercises, like the mad verses called 'A Conceipt of Diabolical Possession,' and the more intimate fantasy of the 'Farewell to Tobacco' ('a little in the way of Withers'), with one love-song, in passing, to a dead woman whom he had never spoken to. The Elizabethan experiments, 'John Woodvil,' and, much later, 'The Wife's Trial,' intervene, and we see Lamb under a new aspect, working at poetry with real ambition. His most considerable attempt, the work of his in verse which he would most have liked to be remembered, was the play of 'John Woodvil.' 'My tragedy,' he wrote to Southey, at the time when he was finishing it, 'will be a medley (as I intend it to be a medley) of laughter and tears, prose and verse, and in some places rhyme, songs, wit, pathos, humour, and, if possible, sublimity; at least, it is not a fault in my intention if it does not comprehend most of these discordant colours.' It was meant, in short, to be an Elizabethan play, done, not in the form of a remote imitation, but with 'a colloquial ease and spirit, something like' Shakespeare, as he says. As a play, it is the dream of a shadow. Reading it as poetry, it has a strange combination of personal quality with literary experiment: an echo, and yet so intimate; real feelings in old clothes. The subject probably meant more to Lamb than people have usually realised. I do not doubt that he wrote it with a full consciousness of its application to the tragic story which had desolated his own household, with a kind of generous casuistry, to ease a somewhat uneasy mind, and to be a sort of solace and defence for Mary. The moral of it is: 'And not for one misfortune, child of chance, And when John Woodvil, after his trial, begins 'to understand what kind of creature Hope is,' and bids Margaret 'tell me if I over-act my mirth,' is there not a remembrance of that mood which Lamb had confessed to Coleridge, just after his mother's funeral, when he says, 'I was in danger of making myself too happy?' Some touch of this poignant feeling comes into the play here and there, but not vividly enough to waken it wholly out of what Southey called its 'lukewarm' state. The writing has less of the Elizabethan rhetoric and more of the quaint directness, the kindly nature, the eager interest in the mind, which those great writers whom Lamb discovered for the modern world had to teach him, than any play written on similar models. I am reminded sometimes of Heywood, sometimes of Middleton; and even when I find him in his play 'imitating the defects of the old writers,' I cannot but confess with Hazlitt that 'its beauties are his own, though in their manner. Others have written more splendidly in the Eliza |