A cynical critic once remarked that no great poet is intelligible and no little poet worth understanding, but that otherwise poetry is an admirable thing.  This, however, seems to us a somewhat harsh view of the subject.  Little poets are an extremely interesting study.  The best of them have often some new beauty to show us, and though the worst of them may bore yet they rarely brutalise.  Poor Folks’ Lives, for instance, by the Rev. Frederick Langbridge, is a volume that could do no possible harm to any one.  These poems display a healthy, rollicking, G. R. Sims tone of feeling, an almost unbounded regard for the converted drunkard, and a strong sympathy with the sufferings of the poor.  As for their theology, it is of that honest, downright and popular kind, which in these rationalistic days is probably quite as useful as any other form of theological thought.  Here is the opening of a poem called A Street Sermon, which is an interesting example of what muscular Christianity can do in the sphere of verse-making: 

   What, God fight shy of the city? 
      He’s t’ other side up I guess;
   If you ever want to find Him,
      Whitechapel’s the right address.

Those who prefer pseudo-poetical prose to really prosaic poetry will wish that Mr. Dalziel had converted most of his Pictures in the Fire into leaders for the Daily Telegraph, as, from the literary point of view, they have all the qualities dear to the Asiatic school.  What a splendid leader the young lions of Fleet Street would have made out of The Prestige of England, for instance, a poem suggested by the opening of the Zulu war in 1879.

   Now away sail our ships far away o’er the sea,
      Far away with our gallant and brave;
   The loud war-cry is sounding like wild revelrie,
      And our heroes dash on to their grave;
   For the fierce Zulu tribes have arisen in their might,
      And in thousands swept down on our few;
   But these braves only yielded when crushed in the fight,
      Man to man to their colours were true.

The conception of the war-cry sounding ‘like wild revelrie’ is quite in the true Asiatic spirit, and indeed the whole poem is full of the daring English of a special correspondent.  Personally, we prefer Mr. Dalziel when he is not quite so military.  The Fairies, for instance, is a very pretty poem, and reminds us of some of Dicky Doyle’s charming drawings, and Nat Bentley is a capital ballad in its way.  The Irish poems, however, are rather vulgar and should be expunged.  The Celtic element in literature is extremely valuable, but there is absolutely no excuse for shrieking ‘Shillelagh!’ and ‘O Gorrah!’