BOUDOIR BALLADS.■

THERE are a great many poets now-a-days, we say it with a sigh, but, alas ! there is no Pope to write a Dunciad, and immortalise their names while he crushes their works. No more "mute inglorious Miltons " will dwell unheeded in our villages, but rather will thousands of spurious Miltons line our book-shelves and benumb our reason. The length of a publisher's long- suffering seems still to be an undetermined quantity. In times but lately gone by, and by many of us sincerely regretted, it was necessary before a work found its way into general circulation that it should possess some actual merit, and if it were, for instance, a book of poems, some knowledge of graceful expression and the laws of versification. But the great circulating libraries can now, so to speak, shove any book down their subscribers' throats, and the rage for light reading induced by the sensation novel and the monthly magazine, devours with equal avidity, and forgets with equal ease, stories of crime and verses of nonsense. People are not particular as to the merit of a work when they only keep it three days, and hence the enormous amount of social sketches, satirical pamphlets, and vers de sociOe' with which our literature is infested, and in which, were it not for some brilliant exceptions, it would be in danger of being swamped. There would be little harm in this light reading, had it not grown to such an enormous extent, but having done so, all taste for more solid food is taken away, and we know that no one can habitually read books which give a false colouring to life, without being in some way deterio- rated by them. However, it is not of the fiction current just now that we desire to speak, but of a certain book called Boudoir Ballads, which may fairly be taken as a type of the more senseless and soulless of the vers de societe of the day, though we hope and believe that few collections of verses rival it in utter worth- lessness. Before noticing the inside, we must remark that both printer and publisher have done their best. The print is clear and large, the paper is thick and cream-coloured, the outside is blue and gold, with a design of scroll-work, flowers, and birds, very superior to ordinary book-binders' patterns, in fact, it is an edition de luxe, and in this respect deserves its title, but unfortunately the inside tells a different tale, and this well-looking volume is but a blue-and-gold sepulchre, full of dead men's bones. No one would wish to judge the modern vers de societe by the canons of severe criticism, or expect the force of Byron or the melody of Keats from verses on a flower-show or a " kettle-drum ;" but what we may, and do, fairly demand is, that there should be some grace and fancy in the versus, and a fair amount of common-sense in the treatment of the subject. And here we may remark that the very title of this work is a misnomer, for that the poems contained under this heading of Boudoir Ballads are not ballads at all, have nothing of the nature of the ballad in them. A " ballad," in the proper sense of the word, is, par excellence, the record of incident, either grave or gay ; of such kind are the whole, series of English ballads, from " Chevy Chase " to Tennyson's Lord of Burleigh," Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner" being, perhaps, the most perfect example in our language. It is only because the first records of a people's exploits or sufferings were generally chanted, that the word " ballad " gained its secondary meaning of a song; in the beginning, it was simply a tale in verse. But even in the secondary meaning the above-mentioned poems are not ballads, for they are not songs, and sometimes extend over twenty or more pages. However, it would matter but little how inaccurate the title were, if the verses themselves were of any merit, but we must confess that till we read them we did not know bow far the patience of the public could be stretched. H such productions can find a publisher, no boy need for the future write sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow without having them made

* Boudoir Ballads. By J. nobly Sharp. London : Chatty and Windne.

Afty Bab Ballads. By W. B. Gilbert. London : Rontlodge and Sono.

into a book afterwards. Let us quote the first verse of the first poem in the book by way of example ; it is called " The Key- note "

" I take the dainty quill of dove, A baby harp of joy;

I pen the lightest phase of love,

I sing the fragle toy."

We can make no comment upon this passage, but leave it to our readers to unravel for themselves. But before we proceed to give further examples of Mr. Ashly Sterry's muse, let us consider for

a moment what a vers de societe should be. We have had in this century the two greatest masters of this style of writing that

England has ever known, and curiously enough, they were con- temporaries,—these were Tom Hood and Winthrop Mackworth Praed, the latter of whom died while still young. It would be alike useless and unkind to demand that modern writers should possess the racy fun and pathos of the first, or the lively fancy and delicate antithesis of the second ; but the most valuable gift of both, the ring of unmistakable sincerity that runs through their verses, may be possessed by every writer, and it is this that we miss the most in the social versifiers of the day. Some touch of human feeling must run through ever so careless utterances, if they are to have any interest ; and a woman must not be described habitually as a pretty pet, nor the majority of the poem devoted to long catalogues of her boots, her ancles, or her head-gear Contrast with such treatment as this the following, from "School' and Schoolfellows," by Praed ; though written forty years ago, the verses have lost none of their brilliancy or point :—

" Twelve years ago !—how many a thought Of faded pains and pleasures

Those whispered syllables have brought From memory's hoarded treasures!

The fields, the forms, the hearts, the books, The glories and disgraces ; The voices of dear friends, the looks Of old familiar faces.

Where are my friends ? I am alone; No playmate shares my beaker. Some lie beneath the churchyard-stone, And some before the Speaker ; And some compose a tragedy, And some compose a rondo, And some draw sword for liberty, And some draw pleas for John Doe."

We did not select these verses of Praed's as possessing any- peculiar merit, but as illustrating what we said above of the rear We did not select these verses of Praed's as possessing any- peculiar merit, but as illustrating what we said above of the rear feeling which is noticeable in his poetry. Now, compare with the above the following, by Mr. Sterry, from the Boudoir Ballads

it is in the Praed metre, but the whole spirit and meaning of his verse are gone :-

" Her Boudoir is a charming oasis,

'Mid dull arid deserts of life, 'Tis the elegant haunt of the Graces, Set free from society's strife; 'Tis a haven of rest amid trouble, When the prism of fashion has flown O'er the wreck of the froth of the babble My lady can ponder alone."

This is a very typical verse of Mr. Sterry's, although it has not hie worst fault, which we shall take occasion to speak of presently.

It is unpleasant to the ear, defective alike in rhyme and swing; and it is, as far as we can make out, absolutely meaningless.

Whether " my lady " or "the Graces " are " set free from society's strife," or any one else, it is impossible to say ; also, it is most difficult to understand a prism flying, and equally hard, even if it possessed that capacity, to see what the wreck of the froth of the bubble has to do with it ; and in any case, why " my lady "

should spend her time pondering over such an extremely small remainder, is incomprehensible. The poem goes on for twenty- pages in this style, and it is no exaggeration to say that in those pages may be sought in vain a word of sense or a pleasant- sounding verse. But it is not the incomprehensibility or the silliness of Mr. Sterry that we have to blame so severely ; other-

poets of the day are equally foolish and far more obscure ; but when we consider those who (if he has any) will be his readers, we must make some remarks on the views of women's lives, duties, and pleasures which are taken in this work,—views which are calculated to foster every absurd vanity and increase every silly affectation. There is in this work

inculcated what may be called the " pretty-pet " theory of woman's treatment, a theory which every thinking man, as well as sensible woman, looks upon with scorn and contempt. Dress them up and put them on the side-board, or in a gilt canoe, or in an opera-box, says Mr. Sterry ; praise their eyes, and their hair, and their ancles,—don't forget to mention minutely their boots, pantalettes (sic), knickerbockers, &c. ; sum up the-

whole with- lobster-salad and champagne under a hot sun ; and that is what women like, and what they're fit for. Well, some of us think differently ; a few of us even remember Wordsworth's lines, and think there may be something in them, after all :—

" Then healthy as a shepherd-boy, And treading among flowers of joy

Which at no season fade, Thou, while thy babes around thee cling, Shalt show us how divine a thing A woman may be made."

To those who admire such conceptions as this, verses like the following, of Mr. Sterry's, from a poem entitled " Chinchilla," seem excessively ignoble as well as flat :—

" The sleekest otter-cuffs,

The rosiest of real-skin, The sable-est of muffs, The softest gloves of seal-skin, The quaintest hose with clocks,

A ' cloud' like a mantilla, The velvetest of frocks—

Wore little, sweet Chinchilla!

Had I enough a year

To find my sweet in sable—

To wrap my dainty dear

In ermine were I able—

Had I a longer purse, A neat suburban villa, For better or for worse I'd take my pet Chinchilla."

We might go on with extract after extract of this kind, but it is hardly necessary to weary our readers with any more of Mr. Sterry's lucubrations. It is a curious question this, of how a man can seriously sit down to write and publish such nonsense as the foregoing, which would be listened to with impatience from a girl in her teens,or a" pretty page whose dimpled chin never had known the barber's shear." u all this twaddle about dear little girls, with nice little curls, eyes like diamonds, and teeth like pearls (Mr.

Sterry will see at once that a dangerous rival is in the field)—if all this twaddle, we say, had any point in it, we should be the

last to object, but the great majority of pieces in this book have no object save to take up a certain amount of space. This volume deals neither with an ideal nor with our real life, but with a world invented by a vapid fancy, where fountains of rose-water play under rose-coloured curtains all day long, while Mr. Sterry sits and writes in a boudoir where it is always afternoon, and generally after dinner. The results are so foolish in their nature and so artificial in their treatment that they would not have deserved notice at all, were it not advisable every now and then to protest against the introductions into libraries of such vulgar nonsense.

We turn with great pleasure from these poems to a volume of the well-known Bab Ballads, a reissue in a more luxurious form

of the best of this series. Here we have, if not refined poetry of the humorous kind like Hood's, at least some amount of genuine fun and considerable power of satire, not without traces of the deeper feeling which we might expect from the author of " The Palace of Truth " and " Pygmalion and Galatea." And indeed in the same way as Mr. Gilbert's plays have something original in these, so have these slight social sketches touches which render them quite distinct from the usual comic poem of the comic papers. The humour, if sometimes forced, is kindly enough, and the satire, such as it is, directed impartially against all comers,— bishops, sailors, or ballet-girls ; no rank is too high, no calling too serious, and no occupation too ordinary for Mr. Gilbert to laugh at or to extract some fun from. The humility of a colonial bishop, who learns a dance from a street-performer in the hopes of thereby gaining an influence over his savage flock, but revolts with horror from the suggestion that he should hop ashore when he re- turned to Rum-ti-foo, is one of the happiest touches in the book, and a good example of the class of subject in which. Mr. Gilbert delights. It is not, however, only in such broad fun as this that Mr. Gilbert succeeds ; there are several little pieces of genuine pathos in this collection, and we hope that Mr. Gilbert will one day give us some more sustained effort in this direction. Of this -kind is a little poem called, " Only a Dancing-girl," which seems to us to grasp the real pathos of the situation, without the slightest approach to the sickly-sentimental halo with which many writers have surrounded actresses and dancers. We have but space to quote two verses, but the whole is well worth attention, and the illustration to it is one of the best in the book, where all are more or less forcible, though pretending to no artistic merit :—

" Only a dancing-girl, With an unromantic style, With borrowed colour and curl,

With fixed, mechanical smile, With many a hackneyed wile, With ungrammatical lips, And corns that mar her trips.

. ..... . And stately dames, that bring Their daughters there to see, Pronounce the ' dancing thing'

No better than she should be,—

With her skirt at her shameful knee, And her painted, tainted phiz,— Ah! matron, which of us is?"