MR. WATSON'S NEW POEMS.* Art lovers of good poetry, and

especially of the finely adjusted word and phrase, will be delighted with the greater part of Mr. William Watson's new volume, Retrogression,. The essence of that poem, as of the poems in a similar key which follow it, is a protest against the more recent developments of modern English poetry—against Byzantinism on the one hand, and an affected coarseness and brutality of thought and language on the other. But we had better not paraphrase Mr. Watson's indictment, but give it in his own words :- " And shouldst thou have in thee to-day Aught thou cant better sing than say, Shun, if thou wouldst by men be heard, The comely phrase, the wellborn word, And use, as for their ears more meet., The loose-lipped lingo of the street, A language Milton's kin have long Accounted good enough for song.

Or don that vesture not less vile,

The beaded and bespangled style—

Diction o'erloaded and impure, Thy thought lost in its garniture, Till this itself becomes the goal, The alpha, omega, and whole ;

Thy Muse, ev'n to her raiment's hem,

Huddling uncostly gem on gem, Striving her lax form to bestar

With all crude ornaments that are ;

An empty and a dreary strife, Vulgar in Letters as in Life."

That is finely put, and there is of course a great deal of truth in it, though not tho whole truth. Mr. Watson forgets the need of variety in literature, and the need also for constant effort to enlarge the scope of man's endeavour in literature as well as in science and in the mechanical arts. We must never forget what Mr. Watson's hero Dryden—and a very worthy hero he is—said to those who objected to what were deemed his innovations in song and his short-cuts to Parnassus. " I trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our tongue." So might say the Byzantincs and the devotees of Slang and Robustiousness. " Hold fast to the old ways " may prove the best dog in the end, and we are inclined to think he is ; but " Tear 'em " is a good dog all the same, and ought to be given his chance. Besides, one can never forget that the "Tear 'ems" of one generation become the "Hold- fasts " of the next. No doubt Mr. Watson would give us many charming and subtle reasons for considering that Burns was never either uncouth or robustious, but always in reality a poet of the Centre, though he wrote in dialect. Nevertheless the fact remains that when our great-great- grandfathers first heard of Burns they thought him a clumsy savage writing in the debased vernacular of a coarse and vulgar peasantry. As far as we know, Dr. Johnson never expressed any opinion about Burns ; but if he had done so, we feel pretty sure of the kind of bludgeon. ing that the poet would have got. And here we may say incidentally that if we are right in thinking that Johnson did not express any opinion • Retrogression, and other Poems. By William Watson. Loudon : John 'Lana 13e. W. net.]

of Burns, the fact is a curious one, since Burns was a neighbour of Boswell. It is true that Burns's first volume was not published till nearly three years after Dr. Johnson's death, but his poems must have been handed about in manuscript long before that. Remember that Johnson in the last year of his life not only read Crabbe's earliest work in MS., but expressed very considerable admiration for it.

In truth there must be no restrictions on literature. " A fair field and no favour," in which every man may take his chance, is as essential in poetry as in Tort. No doubt there is danger in too much licence, but there is a still greater danger in too much strictness. The Muse may die of a strait-waistcoat as well as of a surfeit. We must not applaud poems merely because they are correct, or merely because they are full of verbal conceits and extravagances, or because they shout the language of the gutter. The critic's true business is to keep the lists open for every ono, and to remember that though in the end the eccentrics will find their place, many people whom the world thought eccentrics when they began to write are now regarded as almost too conventional for endurance.

Before we leave the poem " Retrogression " we must quote the admir- able lines on Dryden, for we share to the full Mr. Watson's admiration or the noblest wielder of the heroic couplet that ever turned a rhyme. Neither Marlowe, nor Keats, nor Pope, nor Crabbe, nor Swinburne or Morris among the moderns, ever struck so fine a balance as Dryden :- " Dryden, the athlete large and strong, Lord of the nerve and sinew of song ; The easeful victor, who subdued Till conquest was but habitude ; A hewer and shaper who could see In adamant plasticity ; Who tore from the entrails of the mine The metal of his iron line— Iron that oft all molten rolled, Heaved to a billow, and crashed to gold ; Who, born beside the haughty tomb Of that rank time of ovorbloom When poets vied in gathering each Full-bosomed apple and buxom peach That odorous in the orchard burned, Had, from their purple surfeit, learned The truth in Hellas seen so plain, That the art of arts is to refrain."

Excellent too is the little picture of Gray:—

"Or Gray, who on worn thoughts conferred That second youth, the perfect word, The elected and predestined phrase That had lain bound, long nights and days, To wear at last, when once set free, Immortal pellucidity."

Another poem cast very much in the same mould as " Retrogression " is " Nature's Way." That is a literary plea urged with great felicity of language. The mother-thought is contained in the first couplet :- "' Faultily faultless' may be ill- ' Carefully careless ' is worse still."

A third poem on the literary craft is entitled " Mastery."

Though the poems which deal with literature are to our mind the most interesting in the volume, there are a number of other verses of varying merit. Of these the satirical poems are the least good. In our opinion, indeed, it would have been very much better to leave them out altogether. There are also a certain number of epigrams, which show that Mr. Watson's skill in this particular form of composition is un- diminished. Though the present writer is anything but averse from " bite " in verse, he is bound to say that Mr. Watson is happiest when his epigrams have no personal sting.

The last portion of the volume, entitled " Poems Personal and General," contains some delightful verses written to Mr. Watson's own daughter, and some tributes to his friends. As a whole the volume will attract, in spite of the fact that none of the poems rises to the heights reached by the poet in previous years.