Mr. Ian Hamilton’s Ballad of Hadji is undeniably clever.  Hadji is a wonderful Arab horse that a reckless hunter rides to death in the pursuit of a wild boar, and the moral of the poem—­for there is a moral—­seems to be that an absorbing passion is a very dangerous thing and blunts the human sympathies.  In the course of the chase a little child is drowned, a Brahmin maiden murdered, and an aged peasant severely wounded, but the hunter cares for none of these things and will not hear of stopping to render any assistance.  Some of the stanzas are very graceful, notably one beginning

   Yes—­like a bubble filled with smoke—­
   The curd-white moon upswimming broke
   The vacancy of space;

but such lines as the following, which occur in the description of the fight with the boar—­

   I hung as close as keepsake locket
   On maiden breast—­but from its socket
   He wrenched my bridle arm,

are dreadful, and ‘his brains festooned the thorn’ is not a very happy way of telling the reader how the boar died.  All through the volume we find the same curious mixture of good and bad.  To say that the sun kisses the earth ‘with flame-moustachoed lip’ is awkward and uncouth, and yet the poem in which the expression occurs has some pretty lines.  Mr. Ian Hamilton should prune.  Pruning, whether in the garden or in the study, is a most healthy and useful employment.  The volume is nicely printed, but Mr. Strang’s frontispiece is not a great success, and most of the tail-pieces seem to have been designed without any reference to the size of the page.

Mr. Catty dedicates his book to the memory of Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats—­a somewhat pompous signboard for such very ordinary wine—­and an inscription in golden letters on the cover informs us that his poems are ‘addressed to the rising generation,’ whom, he tells us elsewhere, he is anxious to initiate into the great comprehensive truth that ‘Virtue is no other than self-interest, deeply understood.’  In order to further this laudable aim he has written a very tedious blank verse poem which he calls The Secret of Content, but it certainly does not convey that secret to the reader.  It is heavy, abstract and prosaic, and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions and the most earnest beliefs.  In the rest of the volume, where Mr. Catty does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing things.  The sonnet on Shelley’s room at University College would be admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.

   Green in the wizard arms
   Of the foam-bearded Atlantic,
   An isle of old enchantment,
   A melancholy isle,
   Enchanted and dreaming lies;
   And there, by Shannon’s flowing
   In the moonlight, spectre-thin,
   The spectre Erin sits.

   Wail no more, lonely one, mother of exile wail no more,
   Banshee of the world—­no more! 
   Thy sorrows are the world’s, thou art no more alone;
   Thy wrongs the world’s—­