The last line is very disappointing.  No poet, nowadays, should write of ‘rude Boreas’; he might just as well call the dawn ‘Aurora,’ or say that ‘Flora decks the enamelled meads.’  But there are some nice touches in the poem, and it is pleasant to find that tramps have their harmless moments.  On the whole, the volume, if it is not quite worth reading, is at least worth looking at.  The fool’s motley in which it is arrayed is extremely curious and extremely characteristic.

Mr. Irwin’s muse comes to us more simply clad, and more gracefully.  She gains her colour-effect from the poet, not from the publisher.  No cockneyism or colloquialism mars the sweetness of her speech.  She finds music for every mood, and form for every feeling.  In art as in life the law of heredity holds good.  On est toujours fits de quelqu’un.  And so it is easy to see that Mr. Irwin is a fervent admirer of Mr. Matthew Arnold.  But he is in no sense a plagiarist.  He has succeeded in studying a fine poet without stealing from him—­a very difficult thing to do—­and though many of the reeds through which he blows have been touched by other lips, yet he is able to draw new music from them.  Like most of our younger poets, Mr. Irwin is at his best in his sonnets, and those entitled The Seeker after God and The Pillar of the Empire are really remarkable.  All through this volume, however, one comes across good work, and the descriptions of Indian scenery are excellent.  India, in fact, is the picturesque background to these poems, and her monstrous beasts, strange flowers and fantastic birds are used with much subtlety for the production of artistic effect.  Perhaps there is a little too much about the pipal-tree, but when we have a proper sense of Imperial unity, no doubt the pipal-tree will be as dear and as familiar to us as the oaks and elms of our own woodlands.

(1) Low Down:  Wayside Thoughts in Ballad and Other Verse.  By Two Tramps.  (Redway.)

(2) Rhymes and Renderings.  By H. C. Irwin. (David Stott.)

A RIDE THROUGH MOROCCO

(Pall Mall Gazette, October 8, 1886.)

Morocco is a sort of paradox among countries, for though it lies westward of Piccadilly yet it is purely Oriental in character, and though it is but three hours’ sail from Europe yet it makes you feel (to use the forcible expression of an American writer) as if you had been ’taken up by the scruff of the neck and set down in the Old Testament.’  Mr. Hugh Stutfield has ridden twelve hundred miles through it, penetrated to Fez and Wazan, seen the lovely gate at Mequinez and the Hassen Tower by Rabat, feasted with sheikhs and fought with robbers, lived in an atmosphere of Moors, mosques and mirages, visited the city of the lepers and the slave-market of Sus, and played loo under the shadow of the Atlas Mountains.  He is not an Herodotus nor a Sir John Mandeville, but he tells his stories very pleasantly.  His