Among the social problems of the nineteenth century the tramp has always held an important position, but his appearance among the nineteenth-century poets is extremely remarkable.  Not that a tramp’s mode of life is at all unsuited to the development of the poetic faculty.  Far from it!  He, if any one, should possess that freedom of mood which is so essential to the artist, for he has no taxes to pay and no relations to worry him.  The man who possesses a permanent address, and whose name is to be found in the Directory, is necessarily limited and localised.  Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living.  Was not Homer himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a caravan?  It is then with feelings of intense expectation that we open the little volume that lies before us.  It is entitled Low Down, by Two Tramps, and is marvellous even to look at.  It is clear that art has at last reached the criminal classes.  The cover is of brown paper like the covers of Mr. Whistler’s brochures.  The printing exhibits every fantastic variation of type, and the pages range in colour from blue to brown, from grey to sage green and from rose pink to chrome yellow.  The Philistines may sneer at this chromatic chaos, but we do not.  As the painters are always pilfering from the poets, why should not the poet annex the domain of the painter and use colour for the expression of his moods and music:  blue for sentiment, and red for passion, grey for cultured melancholy, and green for descriptions?  The book, then, is a kind of miniature rainbow, and with all its varied sheets is as lovely as an advertisement hoarding.  As for the peripatetics—­alas! they are not nightingales.  Their note is harsh and rugged, Mr. G. R. Sims is the god of their idolatry, their style is the style of the Surrey Theatre, and we are sorry to see that that disregard of the rights of property which always characterises the able-bodied vagrant is extended by our tramps from the defensible pilfering from hen-roosts to the indefensible pilfering from poets.  When we read such lines as: 

   And builded him a pyramid, four square,
      Open to all the sky and every wind,

we feel that bad as poultry-snatching is, plagiarism is worse.  Facilis descensus Averno!  From highway robbery and crimes of violence one sinks gradually to literary petty larceny.  However, there are coarsely effective poems in the volume, such as A Super’s Philosophy, Dick Hewlett, a ballad of the Californian school, and Gentleman Bill; and there is one rather pretty poem called The Return of Spring: 

   When robins hop on naked boughs,
      And swell their throats with song,
   When lab’rers trudge behind their ploughs,
      And blithely whistle their teams along;

   When glints of summer sunshine chase
      Park shadows on the distant hills,
   And scented tufts of pansies grace
      Moist grots that ’scape rude Borean chills.