Tyneside Songs and Drolleries. By Joe Wilson. (Thomas and George
Allen, Nevscesstle-on-Tyne.)—Tlxis is a collected edition of the "songs and drolleries, readings and temperance songs," of Joe Wilson, a Newcastle lad in humble life, who, both in the literal and in the poetical sense, sang for a living, and died at the early age of thirty-three. His faculty does not seem to have been of a very high order. Here is an example of the average sentiment it contains :—
" The home it =pa bo so grand as stun that aw owl menshun, But what thor's lot's wor awn, tads— an' nivor hear diesenshun Betwixt the wife an me—for needier like to caws° a froon, Wor happy art' wet' byoth content hems wet' settled doon."
But the realism of Wilson's pictures of Tyneside life, and especially of Tyneside drinking and boat-racing—for towards the end of his life he became an ardent temperance reformer, and was always a great admirer of Chambers, Renforth, and other heroes of North- Country oarsmanship—is undoubted, and his sentiments, if ex- pressed in the homeliest of language, and the most uncouth of dialects, are invariably innocuous. Altogether, whoever wishes to study the seamy—or at least the coaly—side of Newcastle life, should read this book.
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