An English anthology of child-poems that excludes Herrick is as an English garden without its roses and an English woodland without its singing birds; and for one verse of Herrick we would gladly give in exchange even those long poems by Mr. Ashby-Sterry, Miss Menella Smedley, and Mr. Lewis Morris (of Penrhyn), to which Mr. Robertson has assigned a place in his collection.  Mr. Robertson, also, should take care when he publishes a poem to publish it correctly.  Mr. Bret Harte’s Dickens in Camp, for instance, is completely spoiled by two ridiculous misprints.  In the first line ‘dimpling’ is substituted for ‘drifting’ to the entire ruin of rhyme and reason, and in the ninth verse ’the pensive glory that fills the Kentish hills’ appears as ‘the Persian glory . . .’ with a large capital P!  Mistakes such as these are quite unpardonable, and make one feel that, perhaps, after all it was fortunate for Herrick that he was left out.  A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

As for Mr. Robertson’s preface, like most of the prefaces in the Canterbury Series, it is very carelessly written.  Such a sentence as ’I . . . believe that Mrs. Piatt’s poems, in particular, will come to many readers, fresh, as well as delightful contributions from across the ocean,’ is painful to read.  Nor is the matter much better than the manner.  It is fantastic to say that Raphael’s pictures of the Madonna and Child dealt a deadly blow to the monastic life, and to say, with reference to Greek art, that ’Cupid by the side of Venus enables us to forget that most of her sighs are wanton’ is a very crude bit of art criticism indeed.  Wordsworth, again, should hardly be spoken of as one who ’was not, in the general, a man from whom human sympathies welled profusely,’ but this criticism is as nothing compared to the passage where Mr. Robertson tells us that the scene between Arthur and Hubert in King John is not true to nature because the child’s pleadings for his life are playful as well as piteous.  Indeed, Mr. Robertson, forgetting Mamillius as completely as he misunderstands Arthur, states very clearly that Shakespeare has not given us any deep readings of child nature.  Paradoxes are always charming, but judgments such as these are not paradoxical; they are merely provincial.

On the whole, Mr. Robertson’s book will not do.  It is, we fully admit, an industrious compilation, but it is not an anthology, it is not a selection of the best, for it lacks the discrimination and good taste which is the essence of selection, and for the want of which no amount of industry can atone.  The child-poems of our literature have still to be edited.

The Children of the Poets:  An Anthology from English and American Writers of Three Generations.  Edited, with an Introduction, by Eric S. Robertson. (Walter Scott.)

NEW NOVELS

(Pall Mall Gazette, October 28, 1886.)