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And yur rooms at College was beastly-more like a whore's than a man's

Till you married that thin flanked woman, as white and as stale as a bone,

And she gave you social nonsense; but where's the kid o' your own?"

And again:

"I believe in the resurrection, if I read my Bible plain, But I wouldn't trust 'em at Wokin'; we're safer at sea

again.

For the heart it shall go with the treasure-go down to the sea in ships.

I'm sick of the hired women-I'll kiss my girl on her lips!" I'll be content with my fountain, I'll drink from my own

well,

And the wife of my youth shall charm me-an' the rest can go to Hell!"

We have given you a fair specimen of nearly thirteen pages of such disgusting stuff as composes "The Mary Gloster."

CHAPTER VI.

BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS OR RUDYARD'S "BUCK

BASKET."

By the Lord, a buck-basket! rammed me in with foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins; that, Master Brooks, there was the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril.-Falstaff.

dall.

Imagine Hercules as oarsman in a rotten boat.-Tyn

Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of his nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, or auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels; he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.-Emerson.

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OST of this job lot of stuff is actually beneath the dignity of even common place criticism. Whether it be original, paraphrased, adapted, translated, pirated, or what not, one is made to wonder why such a monumental pile of low down trash is ever tolerated by a human intellect capable of thinking intelligently, soberly, decently, long enough to put it into the semblance of verse and song, and offer it to a respectable cultured public, even though it be the par excellence of entertainment to a certain class of human beings. The public does not care to know every

thing about everybody. And yet a poet who thinks he can see poetry in the lives of hostlers and chamber-maids would naturally think "stablejargon" suitable diction for his verse. One could not reasonably expect very chaste thought from heroes who say, as in "Soldier and Sailor Too," that "we're most of us liars, we're 'arf of us thieves, an' the rest are as rank as can be." We are not, however, censuring the soldier and the sailor; it is the writer of such songs, who serves mankind so poorly by writing such miserable jingle, and who finds so little use for his talent, who merits, not criticism, but censure: Do you think the author of "Barrack-Room Ballads" more interested in elevating humanity, or that he has more sympathy for the down-trodden, than the author of "SnowBound"? And yet you can scarcely even conceive such a thing as Whittier's appending such ribaldry as these ballads to a volume of his Slave Songs. We do not presume to say that they are entirely original, but the plagiarist who attempts "to steal his sweet and honeyed sentences," will do so more from the unnatural impulse of a literary kleptomaniac than from a moral obliquity that would appropriate the property of another for its intrinsic worth or the glory of its authorship. And until some one attempts to steal them from Mr. Kip

ling, we shall not charge that the reputed author has pirated them.

That his verse should be praised so extravagantly and by so many men of letters is indeed an ill-omen of the times. That the humble should be remembered in song is always gratifying, since it shows that sympathy for our fellows in the meaner stations of life still dwells in each human breast, -of him who delights to read as well as of him who writes, and allays even for a time the gnawing feeling that "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn." But the lowly can be made to understand that they have the sympathy of the more fortunate without its expression in their own polluted thought and vile language. When one would render relief more substantial than a mere tender of sympathy, he does not do so by flinging to the wretched base coins and stale crusts. When a good queen goes among her needy subjects, as good queens have been known to do, distributing alms, it is enough that she lay aside for a time her glittering crown and royal robes; but it is not demanded of her mission that she put on the vile garbs of the inhabitants of the distressed district and speak to them in the speech of their wretched haunts.

Now, protect your olfactories a little, while we quote one stanza from the "Cholera Camp":

"We've got the cholerer in camp-we've got it 'ot and sweet;

It ain't no Christmas dinner, but it's 'elped an' we must

eat.

We've gone beyond the funkin', 'cause we found it doesn't

рау,

An' we're rockin' round the Districk on ten deaths a day!"

Your first thought probably is that the poet must have mistaken a harpy for a muse. Your second should be that it may possibly have been that it was a noxious weed, mistaken perchance for a posy that caused the eminent critic, Henry James, to say it is "the bloom of freshness" in Kipling's writing that makes us "all epicures." But we must be allowed to say, if Mr. James be correct in this and numerous other instances that can be produced, the "epicures" must be such gastronomers as gorged themselves on boar's head and ale in the days of Prince Hal and Jack Falstaff.

"DANNY DEEVER."

In "Danny Deever" we see soldiers trembling at the very ceremonies dishonoring a comrade pre

paratory to hanging him. The ballad is designed fool

to excite pity for a base wretch whom a just law, civil as well as military, would condemn to death for treacherously shooting a sleeping comrade.

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