As to originality in his songs, let him speak for himself. He prefaces that portion of BarrackRoom Ballads published in The Seven Seas from which we take the following, and think them selfexplanatory:

When 'Omer smote his bloomin' Lyre,

He'd 'eard men sing by land and sea;
And what he thought he might require
'E went and took-the same as me.
They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowd
They didn't tell nor make a fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,

An 'e winked back-the same as us.

Admitting that the originality a fellow may display even in the manner he steals, entitles him to great consideration, if not fame, yet the American people at least will be loathe to concede the superior merit of both the music and the sentiment of "Barrack-Room Ballads" when placed alongside such of our soul-stirring national airs as "America", "Star Spangled Banner", "Red, White, and Blue", "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground", and "Home, Sweet Home".

But let us come to the point at issue and be plain about it: Kipling's best claim to originality in verse certainly lies in the facility with which he can use indiscriminately, "jointly and severally," "blood puddin" Henglish, native Hindu, slang, profanity, vulgarity, and what he himself styles,

"Gipsy-folk bolee." Not a great many of his songs and poems are free from that mongrel pest, which hound his tenderest thought as a band of hungry wolves would pursue belated children on the dismal Steppes of Russia. You fear the snarling teeth of this ferocious pack of vulgarisms at every turn his verses take. Many are the verses, too, “Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase, looks like a zebra in a parson's chaise."

“Oh, the dowr and the mag and the thaker and the thag. And the mat and the brinjaree;

And the bunnia and the ryat are as happy and as quiet, And as plump as they can be.”

"Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words."

One is soon surfeited to loathing with 'ed and 'and, and 'e and 'er. If he wishes his hero to swear (which he frequently does), he teaches him none of the mock refinements of the dash, no "p. d. q.” as in the Mutiny of the Mavericks he simply says "by-god" or some familiar equivalent of blasphemy, and goes on until another oath seems to the spokesman quite necessary according to the "rules" of profanity. He calls Hans the blue-eyed Dane, "bull-necked," the Henglish "'ouse maids beefy-faced;" Bill 'Awkins "a livin' breathin' image of an organ-grinder's monkey with a pound

of grease in 'is 'air." All this coarseness is called by his admirers originality, even genius.

As there needs be nothing of the copyist in a bold swearer, so there need be none in one who takes the liberty to set aside all the simplest rules of English composition, English grammar, orthography, or even the plainest rules for the use of capitals. No one would ever seriously charge such defects to unacquaintance with the common school 'branches. Now, what is it? To us it appears nothing but a studied recklessness, that the wild breaking over may seem unrestrainable genius; a kind of literary trademark, as it were, a species of pedantry; for a beggar may be as proud of his rags as a gentleman of his broadcloth. In a less cultured age, in an age when there was not as now a good common school, and a teacher for every forty pupils in the Anglo-Saxon world, a disregard of the rules of school-craft would be little thought of. To-day it is otherwise, as it should be; and yet the exactions made by an intelligent public are not onerous. Nothing is exacted that hampers true genius.

Nor is it necessary for true genius, in order to expand to greatest limit and greatest power, to go about like a mad man, or behave towards the rules of commonly accepted usage like his bovine majesty in the china shop.

Of course, this all helps to produce in a certain class of readers a species of glamour that convinces them that none but a great genius could have so bewitched them.

But all this is more than mere originality. It is more than a diamond in the rough, it is crude genius! For while the diamond may be fashioned in the rough, it must flash forth its brilliancy ever according to fixed laws. But untamable genius, resisting all attempts at artificial polish, is expected to dazzle the beholder with fresh surprises from unexpected directions and at times when its brilliancy is least looked for.

While it is true, as no less critic than Sismondi says, that, “In the effervescence of soul which produces the poet, we often see young minds abandon the study of truth and nature, to encumber themselves with the fetters of a refined versification;" nevertheless, the laws of composition and common decency need not be so far ignored as to fill our language with barbarisms, vulgarisms, ribaldry, and coarseness in order to display originality and boldness. Such is never necessary to originality. It is not necessary to virility. It is necessary to nothing, except to give vent to coarse, vulgar natures seeking or imagining characters in whom such taste may seem appropriate, as a sort

of apology which the authors tender as it were to their readers for the low taste their greatest passion, by friends called genius, impels them to exhibit, and which they do not quite wish to acknowledge as their own.

Contrast what Dean Milman says of Macaulay's style with that of Kipling's as we find it in the "Barrack-Room Ballads," in "The Seven Seas." Says Milman of Macaulay's fascinating style: "Its characteristics were vigor and animation, copiousness, clearness; above all, sound English, now a rare excellence. The vigor and life were unabating; perhaps in that conscious strength which cost no exertion, he did not always guage and measure the force of his own words. His copiousness had nothing tumid, diffuse, Asiatic, no ornament for the sake of ornament. As to its clearness, one may read a sentence of Macaulay twice to judge of its full force, never to comprehend its meaning. His English was pure both in idiom and in words, pure to fastidiousness; every word must be genuine English, nothing that approached vulgarity, nothing that had not the stamp of popular use, or the authority of sound English writers, nothing unfamiliar to the common ear."

Could a stronger antithesis be found to Kip