manners of the Augustan age with scrupulous and affectionate exactness. Austin Dobson is one of many who have embalmed in verse the manners of the past; "the assembly," "the rout," the literary coterie, the "form and pressure of "Anna's or of George's day." Poems on such topics may well be called the verse of culture, or even society verse, though they have to do with a vanished society. Austin Dobson's To a Missal of the Thirteenth Century embodies regret for an aspect of the past interesting to the literary man. The Old Sedan Chair and Molly Trefusis are society verse from the standpoint of the lover of the eighteenth century. FitzGerald's Chivalry at a Discount, Praed's The Vicar, Locker-Lampson's The Old Oak Tree come within his category. Dobson's To a Missal ends:

Not as ours the books of old

Things that steam can stamp and fold;
Not as ours the books of yore

Rows of type and nothing more.

Then a book was still a Book,
Where a wistful man might look,
Finding something through the whole
Beating — like a human soul.

In that growth of day by day,
When to labor was to pray,
Surely something vital passed
To the patient page at last.

Something that one still perceives

Vaguely present in the leaves;

Something from the worker lent,

Something mute — but eloquent.

In our country poets have contributed not a little to the graceful and spirited verse of culture. The wit of Dr. Holmes frequently played about social themes with good-humored sprightliness. The Last Leaf and Dorothy Q are all that society verse should be, and the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table is society verse in prose, if such a contradiction is admissible. Mr. William Allen Butler's Nothing to Wear is such kindly satire that, in spite of the moral earnestness of the close, it falls within the general definition. The author, too, seems thoroughly at home in the world he describes. Mr. Aldrich's poetry is always marked with distinction, polish, and urbanity. His Thalia is absolutely perfect, the acme of the poetry of culture. There is no poem in the language in which the contrast between worldliness and unsophisticated nature is more felicitously presented than in Mr. Stedman's Pan in Wall Street. Praed himself could not have touched the chord with more unerring perception, nor have put his rhymes together with more delicate skill, albeit the meter is one which the English poet has made peculiarly his own. This and Dr. Holmes's Last Leaf touch high-water mark. Our tendency to grotesque, ex

aggerated humor carries many of our lighter rhymes outside of the definition of society verse. Good-humored toleration of folly and readiness to catch the human features behind the mask of affectation and conventionalism is not a distinctive trait of men descended from Puritan ancestors. Consequently, the note of ridicule or of satire is sometimes heard instead of the kindly cynicism of one familiar with all the phases of society. Again, our past is not so picturesque as is that of England, and our social life lacks many of the class traditions that give perspective and color to an old civilization. Our "passing show" lacks longestablished associations, and it must be confessed is not so interesting and thought-provoking, nor amusing as is that of the mother country. A people which has originated the phrase the “strenuous life" and pronounces the word "hustle" with religious fervor, does not breathe the atmosphere of cultivated leisure in which delicate literary flowers bloom.

Nevertheless, an American anthology of fugitive verse might be compiled in which wit, sincerity, playfulness, and pathos should be commingled in just proportions. The compiler would draw on the work of Clinton Scollard and Walter Learned and George A. Baker and many others of less note, and could easily show that we are not unapt disciples of Prior and Praed and Austin Dobson.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH FORMS

THE rondel, the rondeau, the triolet, the villanelle, the ballade, and the chant royal are metrical schemes which were invented in France proper, that is in the northern part of what is now France, some of them as early as the thirteenth century. With them may be included the sestina invented in Provence in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. All of these are forms as strictly as is the Italian sonnet, indeed even more so, since the rhyme scheme is inflexible, although some latitude is allowed in the length of the lines. All except the last have been adopted by poets in the English language since the seventeenth century, although the number of rhyming words required is a serious obstacle to their general use. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Swinburne and Dobson in England, and Bunner and several other writers of light verse in our country, wrote a number of ballades, rondels, and rondeaux which have much of the grace and vivacity of the best French speciThe allowance of identical terminals as rhymes in French poetry, as for instance all

mens.

four and eleven being the first phrase or even the first word of the first line repeated. The refrain is sometimes omitted entirely. Mr. Swinburne wrote a century of poems in this form, and they show his astonishing facility in rhyming, but lack of power in deft and dexterous phrasing. The following is one of the most pleasing:

"Far-fetched and dear-bought," as the proverb rehearses,

Is good, or was held so, for ladies; but nought In a song can be good if the turn of the verse is Far-fetched and dear-bought.

As the turn of a wave should it sound, and the thought

Ring smooth; and as light as the spray that disperses Be the gleam of the words for the garb thereof wrought.

Let the soul in it shine through the sound as it pierces
Men's hearts with possession of music unsought,
For the bounties of song are no jealous god's mercies,
Far-fetched and dear-bought.

The rondolet is a pretty diminutive of the rondel. It consists of seven lines only, two of which are the first repeated.

Say what you please,

But know, I shall not change my mind!

Even, if

Say what you please,

you wish it, on your knees —
And when you hear me next defined
As something lighter than the wind,
Say what you please.