is a fundamental right-mindedness; you feel, somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are very good.  There is nothing disturbing about them; ils peuvent etre mis dans toutes les mains; they are kind, generous, even noble.  They sympathise with animate and inanimate nature.  They have shining foreheads with big bumps of benevolence, like Flora Casby’s father, and one inclines to believe that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear, if only because their vision is blurred.  They are fond of lists of names which never suggest things; they are sparing of similes.  If they use them they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definite simile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certain test of reality.

But it is impossible to be serious about them.  The more stupid of them supply the matter for a good laugh; the more clever the stuff of a more recondite amazement.  What is one to do when Mr Monro apostrophises the force of Gravity in such words as these?—­

  ’By leave of you man places stone on stone;
  He scatters seed:  you are at once the prop
  Among the long roots of his fragile crop
  You manufacture for him, and insure
  House, harvest, implement, and furniture,
  And hold them all secure.’

We are not surprised to learn further that

  ’I rest my body on your grass,
  And let my brain repose in you.’

All that remains to be said is that Mr Monro is fond of dogs (’Can you smell the rose?’ he says to Dog:  ‘ah, no!’) and inclined to fish—­both of which are Georgian inclinations.

Then there is Mr Drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man for moonlit apples—­’moon-washed apples of wonder’—­and the righteous man’s sense of robust rhythm in this chorus from ’Lincoln’:—­

    ’You who know the tenderness
  Of old men at eve-tide,
    Coming from the hedgerows,
  Coming from the plough,
    And the wandering caress
  Of winds upon the woodside,
    When the crying yaffle goes
  Underneath the bough.’

Mr Drinkwater, though he cannot write good doggerel, is a very good man.  In this poem he refers to the Sermon on the Mount as ’the words of light From the mountain-way.’

Mr Squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make an excellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity.  He would repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in the same way as, we suppose, he deceives himself.  His poem ‘Rivers’ seems to us a very curious example of the faux bon.  Not only is the idea derivative, but the rhythmical treatment also.  Here is Mr de la Mare:—­