THE roses are the silver roses of King's, but most
of the dew from them was distilled at Eton, where Mr. Ramsay is Lower
Master, or Ostiarius, and Some of the allusions in these verses, Latin and English, will only be understood by Etonians. Whichever language he writes, Mr. Ramsay is easy and fluent,
and thoroughly agreeable-. You can even forgive him the Cockney rhymes in "All Square," and his rhyming Latin speeches for the recently revived ceremony of the Boy
Bishop make you wish you could have been present to hear them declaimed, and to watch the glorious procession described in the elegiacs on "The Founder's Pageant."
Besides the purely Etonian matter, there is a fair selection of prize copies, versions -set in competitions, and jokes like those which many will remember in Arundines Canti. Of the serious copies, a Horatian version of Thaekeray's
"A _ Word about Dinners" is particularly successful. The question arises, in what consists the pleasure of such ,a volume as this ? For pleasure it undoubtedly gives even
to :those unskilled in versification. Principally, it may be thought, in admiration of the ingenuity by which a sort of play on the words secures the expression of a thoroughly modem conception in an impeccably classical phrase, even though the sense would have been completely unintelligible to a Roman. Where there is a correspondence of thought, the pleasure lies in the recognition of beautiful and familiar words applied to new uses. Ausonius did something of both kinds in his cento from Virgil, though there the joke consisted in the graceless application of consecrated words.
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