provinces.  Now and then, however, we come across some pleasing passages.  Mr. Doveton apparently is an enthusiastic fisherman, and sings merrily of the ‘enchanting grayling’ and the ‘crimson and gold trout’ that rise to the crafty angler’s ‘feathered wile.’  Still, we fear that he will never produce any real good work till he has made up his mind whether destiny intends him for a poet or for an advertising agent, and we venture to hope that should he ever publish another volume he will find some other rhyme to ‘vision’ than ‘Elysian,’ a dissonance that occurs five times in this well-meaning but tedious volume.

As for Mr. Ashby-Sterry, those who object to the nude in art should at once read his lays of The Lazy Minstrel and be converted, for over these poems the milliner, not the muse, presides, and the result is a little alarming.  As the Chelsea sage investigated the philosophy of clothes, so Mr. Ashby-Sterry has set himself to discover the poetry of petticoats, and seems to find much consolation in the thought that, though art is long, skirts are worn short.  He is the only pedlar who has climbed Parnassus since Autolycus sang of

   Lawn as white as driven snow,
   ’Cypress black as e’er was crow,

and his details are as amazing as his diminutives.  He is capable of penning a canto to a crinoline, and has a pathetic monody on a mackintosh.  He sings of pretty puckers and pliant pleats, and is eloquent on frills, frocks and chemisettes.  The latest French fashions stir him to a fine frenzy, and the sight of a pair of Balmoral boots thrills him with absolute ecstasy.  He writes rondels on ribbons, lyrics on linen and lace, and his most ambitious ode is addressed to a Tomboy in Trouserettes!  Yet his verse is often dainty and delicate, and many of his poems are full of sweet and pretty conceits.  Indeed, of the Thames at summer time he writes so charmingly, and with such felicitous grace of epithet, that we cannot but regret that he has chosen to make himself the Poet of Petticoats and the Troubadour of Trouserettes.

(1) Carols from the Coal-Fields, and Other Songs and Ballads.  By Joseph Skipsey. (Walter Scott.)

(2) Sketches in Prose and Verse.  By F. B. Doveton. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)

(3) The Lazy Minstrel.  By J. Ashby-Sterry. (Fisher Unwin.)

A NEW CALENDAR

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 17, 1887.)

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.  Their compilers display a degraded passion for chronicling small beer, and rake out the dust-heap of history in an ardent search after rubbish.  Mr. Walter Scott, however, has made a new departure and has published a calendar in which every day of the year is made beautiful for us by means of an elegant extract from the poems of Mr. Alfred Austin.  This, undoubtedly, is a step in the right direction.  It is true that such aphorisms as