The Rowfant Library has disappeared.  Great possessions are great cares.  ’But ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land-rats, water-thieves, and land-thieves—­I mean pirates; and then there is the peril of waters, winds and rocks.’  To this list the nervous owner of rare books must add fire, that dread enemy of all the arts.  It is often difficult to provide stabling for dead men’s hobby-horses.  It were perhaps absurd in a world like this to grow sentimental over a parcel of old books.  Death, the great unbinder, must always make a difference.

Mr. Locker’s poetry now forms a volume of the Golden Treasury Series.  The London Lyrics are what they are.  They have been well praised by good critics, and have themselves been made the subject of good verse.

’Apollo made one April day
A new thing in the rhyming way;
Its turn was neat, its wit was clear,
It wavered ’twixt a smile and tear. 
Then Momus gave a touch satiric,
And it became a London Lyric.’ 

                                          AUSTIN DOBSON.

In another copy of verses Mr. Dobson adds: 

’Or where discern a verse so neat,
So well-bred and so witty—­
So finished in its least conceit,
So mixed of mirth and pity?’

’Pope taught him rhythm, Prior ease,
Praed buoyancy and banter;
What modern bard would learn from these? 
Ah, tempora mutantur!’

Nothing can usefully be added to criticism so just, so searching, and so happily expressed.

Some of the London Lyrics have, I think, achieved what we poor mortals call immortality—­a strange word to apply to the piping of so slender a reed, to so slight a strain—­yet

‘In small proportions we just beauties see.’

It is the simplest strain that lodges longest in the heart.  Mr. Locker’s strains are never precisely simple.  The gay enchantment of the world and the sense of its bitter disappointments murmur through all of them, and are fatal to their being simple, but the unpretentiousness of a London Lyric is akin to simplicity.

His relation to his own poetry was somewhat peculiar.  A critic in every fibre, he judged his own verses with a severity he would have shrunk from applying to those of any other rhyming man.  He was deeply dissatisfied, almost on bad terms, with himself, yet for all that he was convinced that he had written some very good verses indeed.  His poetry meant a great deal to him, and he stood in need of sympathy and of allies against his own despondency.  He did not get much sympathy, being a man hard to praise, for unless he agreed with your praise it gave him more pain than pleasure.

I am not sure that Mr. Dobson agrees with me, but I am very fond of Locker’s paraphrase of one of Clement Marot’s Epigrammes; and as the lines are redolent of his delicate connoisseurship, I will quote both the original (dated 1544) and the paraphrase: