BOOKS.

PIKE COUNTY BALLADS.*

OF the four Pike County Ballads which commence this volume, and are certainly much the best things in it, two, namely, Little Breeches and Jim 13ludso, which have now attained to the honours of an illustrated edition, have already appeared in these columns ; indeed, we were so struck by their great humour, that we copied

1. Pike County &Wads, and other Poems. By John Hay. Boston (Massa- ohm:0UB): Osgood.

2. Jini. Realm and LizIls Breed" By John Hay, Ilaustro,ted, London: Trlibner. Boston: Osgood,

them out of the New York Tribune, where they first saw the light. Still, though our readers are probably familiar with Mr. John Ility'a two most successful efforts, and neither of the other two Pike County Ballads can be said to reach quite the same high level, yet there is sufficient excuse ia their formal acknow- ledgment by their author, as well as in the publication of other illustrations of his power, for a few criticisms on these fresh and vigorous ballade. If we take no notice of the more- sentimental poems by which they are followed, it is not because- they are in any way unworthy of their author, but because we. have too many poems of that sort in England, and they pass. too little beyond the line of average ability attained by clever- men who write verse at all, to make them specially interesting to us. We learn from them that Mr. Hay shares strongly the liberal. sympathies of all republicans in relation to European affairs, that he has no slight tincture of the romantic in his nature, and that. what he feels he can say with more than the average amount of freshness and force. But it would not be true to speak of the bulk of the poems which follow the Pike County Ballads as in any way remarkable. It is by the class of ballads of which. " Little Breeches," "Jim Bludso," "Beaty Tim," and "The- Mystery of Gilgal" are as yet the only specimens, that Mr. Hay seems at present most likely to win his place in American, literature.

It is not the specially distinguishing characteristic of these' Pike County Ballads, but rather of all humorous American.. verse, from the Bigelow Ballads to Bret Harte's, Ilene Breit- maim's, and Mr. Hay's, that they treat with a certain grim familiarity and audacity the most serious and even awful scenes. and topics, not necessarily irreverently, for some of their authors (notably Mr. Lowell and Mr. [lay) seem generally to find their humour bubbling up most in the very effort to engrave, a certain unconventional and intense moral faith on the cut- and-dried conscience of an insincere world,—but if not irrever- ently, at least with a startling self-possession and absence of that self-abasement and self-humiliation which a like spiritual faith generally implies in the old world. An admirable example, of this kind of off-handed, easy-going faith is the ballad of " Little- Breeches" itself, with its throw-off repudiating the notion of "going much on religion," and its condescending explanation of - why, though the supposed writer "don't pan out on the prophets,. and free-will, and that sort o' thing," yet he has " b'lieved in God, and the angels ever Bence one night last spring." The ballad relates-. how the narrator's four-year-old little boy was carried off from au, inn door by the alarmed team of his waggon, which dashed into- the deep snow of the prairie during the driver's momentary.' absence in the inn,—how the waggon was found upset and the- horses buried in snow, and the child was discovered in a neigh- bouring larnbfold sitting quite snug among the lambs, amb chirping "as peart as ever you see,"— " I went a chew of terbacker,

And that's what's the matter of me."

Thereupon the ballad concludes

"How did be git thar ? Angels.

He could never have walked in that storm.

They jest scooped down and toted him To whar it was safe and warm.

And I think that saving a little child, And bringing him to his own, Is a denied sight hotter business Than loafing around The Throne."

There is clearly nothing irreverent in angels ' scooping down and toting' a little boy to where it is safe and warm, though the- phraseology is undoubtedly of a free-and-easy kind, and implies no- awe of those supernatural beings; indeed,—far from awe,—there is a. disposition to dispute with the angels their proper function in life,.. and to warn them off the contemplative joys usually allotted to them. in the spiritual world, which seems to bespeak a mind extremely satisfied with itself, and by no means disposed even to repent of the-

style of education deliberately bestowed on 'Little Breeches,' who,. we are told, was

"Pearl and chipper and sassy,

Always ready to swear and fight.,— And I'd larnt him to chew terbackor Jest to keep his milk-teeth white."

" Peart and chipper and sassy" is the exact description, not only' of Little Breeches, but of the whole Pike-County race described, an even of their religion. When 'Jim Bludso ' was called to his ac- count, 'the night of the Prairie Belle,'—note that his individual. judgment, the scrutiny of his soul, is characteristically described as. a " passing-in of his checks,"—his biographer, though he makes a strong claim for him on the ground of his unflinching discharge:

of duty at the cost of his own life at the last, is not only at no ipains to make him appear other wise than " peart and chipper and

sassy," but is rather disposed to found his admiration for Jim on these qualities :—

" He weren't no saint,—them engineers Is all pretty much alike,—

One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill And another one here in Pike ;

A koerloes man in his talk was Jim, And an awkward hand in a row,

But he never flunked, and he never lied, I reckon he never knowod how.

"And this was all the religion he had,—

To treat his engine well; Never be passed on the river, To mind the pilot's ball; And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,— A thousand times ho swore, He'd bold her nozzle agin the bank Till the last soul got ashore."

'The sub-feeling clearly is that men who live a life of something qike licence, if there be a law within that licence for which they will, when required, sacrifice all, are all the better for the complete .absence of that temptation to hypocrisy and ostentation to which men of more regular lives are liable.

But this is by no means the whole account of the charm which the " peart and chipper and sassy" tribe have for these American immouriets. Unquestionably, the easy and perfectly eel-pos-

sessed treatment of subjects which inspire a natural awe, has in it a strong humorous fascination of its own, though we are by no means sure that it is a healthy fascination. Can anything be more strikingly 6 peart and chipper and sassy' than the following account of a furious and deadly fray about nothing, called the 'Mystery of

■ Crilgal ' (pronounce it Gilgaul),---in which there is no trace of a moral motive, nothing but the curiously grim humour involved in the treatment of a (Nits purposeless yet wholesale tragedy, as if it were a matter-of-course affair, of no more importance than a sschool-boy snow-balling :—

" THE MYSTERY Or GILGIAL.

"The darkest strangest mystery

I over read, or heern' or see, Is 'long of a drink at Taggart's Hall,— Tom Taggart's of Gilgal.

4' I've heern the tale a thousand ways,

But never, could git through the maze That hangs around that queer day's doin's ; But I'll toll the yarn to youans.

4' Tom Taggart stood behind his bar, Thu time was fall, the skies was far, The neighbors round the counter drawod,

And ca'rnly drinked and jawed.

4' At last come Colonel Blood of Pike,

And old Jodge Phinn, pormieous-like, And each, as he meandered in, Remarked, A whisky-skin.'

46 Tom mixed the beverage full and far,

And slammed it, smoking, on the bar.

Some says three fingers, some says two,—

I'll leave the choice to you.

41 Phinn to the drink put forth his hand; Blood drawed his knife, with went bland, '1 ax yor parding, Mister Milan—

Jest drap that whisky-skin.'

-"No man high-tonoder could be found Than old Jodge Phinn the country round. Says ho, 'Young man the tribe of Phinns Knows their own Whisky-skins !'

"Ho wont for his 'levee-inch bowie-knife:— ' I tries to foller a Christian life ; But I'll drap a slice of liver or two,

My bloomin' shrub, with you.'

44 They carved in a way that all admired, Tell Blood drawed iron at last, and fired. It took Seth Bludso *twixt the eyes, Which caused him great surprise. 4‘ Then coats went off, and all wont in;

hots and bad language swelled the din ; The short, sharp bark of Derringers, Like bull-pups, (Moored the furse.

44 They piled the stiffs outeido the door ; They made, I reckon, a cord or more. 'Girls went that winter, as a rule, Alone to spollin'-school.

"I've IF:arched in vain, from Dan to Beer- Sheba, to make this mystery clear ; But I end with hit as I did begin,—.

\Vuo 0 OT TILE WIIISKY•SILLN ?" Notice the still-life background of the story

The neighbors round the counter drawed, And ca'inly drinked and jawed."

The two combatants quietly "meandering in" and " remarking" Art, and Custom, By Edward B. Tylor. 2 vols. Loudon: Murray. 1871. "a whisky-skin,"—mind, they do not order it, but drop their wish casually, so indifferent do they appear to be to the subject of this deadly strife,—and the criticism on Judge Phinn that no man could be found high-tone'der than he, as he remarks majestically that "the tribe of Phinns knows their own whisky-skins," are full of the special cynicism of American humour. And then when the duel commences, what a wealth of contempt for life is contained in that favourite Americanism for sword-duelling,..... "They carved in a way that all admired," and in the verse which describes the pile of dead and the solitude of the young women during the ensuing winter The whole humour of this ballad,— and it seems to us great,—is in the wonderful grimness of its familiarity with violence and death. The Pike County Ballads are peart and chipper and sassy' not only with Angels and Judg- ment, but with Death itself. They afford an example of the type of humour which was strong in Charles II. (though this naturally is of a freer and coarser kind), of which the favourite illustration has always been his grim apology to his courtiers for being so incon- veniently long in dying. The soldier who is supposed to tell the story of 6 Banty Tim ' is humorous in precisely the same faahion when he tells of his disablement on the glade of Vickeburg :— "When the rest retreated. I stayed behind For reasons suilicrent to me,—

With a rib caved in and a leg on a strike I sprawled on that damned glacoo."

But the striking feature of these ballads is not only in the grim, familiarity of their treatment of guilt, danger, judgment, death, and the supernatural world ; they are full of brief, graphic touches, marvellously vivid and picturesiue. What can be more effective than the account of the cause of the fire on the Prairie Belle?— " All boats has their day on the Mitteissip, And her day come at last,—

The Movaetar was a better boat,

But the Belle she wouidn't be passed. And so she come tearin' along that night— The oldest craft on the line—

With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,

And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine."

There is twice as much vividness in that verse, as in the by no means bad picture of the nigger squat on her safety-valve' which appears in the illustrated edition, for in the picture you only see the nigger enjoying his danger, but here you see the race and the darkness, and the blazing furnace beneath the boiler ; and then when the fire bursts oat, what a strongly painted picture there is in the second of these limes,- " The fire bust out as she clared the bar, And burnt a hole in the night;"

and again in the lines,—

'' Through the hot black breath of the burntte boat. Jim Bludso's voice was hoard, And they all had trust in his cussedness, And knuwed ho would keep his word."

It was a great stroke of modern realisin to make it Jim Bhulso's " cussedness,"—or, as we should say in our much less expressive phraseology, his devil,'—and not his sense of duty, in which they had trust. Again, in " Banty Tim," what can be more graphic in its delineation of a farmer's scorn than the final statement to the democratic meeting

YOU may rezoloot till the cows come home,

But of one of you totches the boy, He'll wrestle his hash to-night in hell, Or my name's not Tilmon Joy."

To rezoloot till the cows come home" is a most happy and vivid delineation of a perfectly fruitless democratic anausement, indulged in solely for its own sake, and not from any regard to consequences.

The Pike County Ballads are not only, then, peart chipper and sassy,'—i.e., grimly humorous, both in relation to natural and supernatural perils,—bat they are full of sharp, graphics touches, which bring the vividest scenery, physical and moral, before your eyes. All we need for the perfect delineation of the fast devil-may-care life of the borders of civilization, and its snatches of rude faith, is more in quantity, and this is, we trust, a deficiency which Mr. John Hay will neither be unable nor unwilling to supply.