16 MAY 1903, Page 27

Poets and Poetry of Blackburn. By George Hull. (Times Office,

Blackburn.)—Mr. Hull has brought together here more than fifty poets as represented by extracts from their works. These fifty-odd are the poetical harvest of Blackburn during the last hundred years. The writer of this notice feels himself unable to do the volume jnstie,e, for he has but an ordinary acquaintance with Lancashire, and this scarcely going beyond Liverpool and Manchester, and the dialect is but casually known to him. But he can affirm, judging chiefly by the non-dialect poems, that this is a very remarkable outcome for a single town. He has had for many years a considerable acquaintance with minor verse, and he is well within the truth when ho says that its average is not on the level of the "poetry of Blackburn."