ENGLISH DIALECTS.
English Dialects. By W. W. Skeat. (Cambridge University Press. ls. net.)—This little volume, one of the "Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature," gives in a concentrated form a great amount of information. "From the eighth century to the present day " is the period which Professor Skeet takes in: only an expert with a special gift for putting much into a small com- pass could, have adequately fulfilled the promise. One criticism only we have to make, and it concertos the chapter entitled " A
Few Specimens." We should have liked to see included among them more of the dialect poems which have won real literary fame. Tennyson and William Barnes are mentioned, but mentioned only. Everyone may perhaps be supposed to have Tennyson at hand. Professor Skeat, however, gives a quotation from a well-known poem of Robert Burns, but William Barnes ought surely to have been represented. He is the English Theocritus, though scarcely as well known as he ought to be:
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