dialectic poetry, as in parts of his fairy fancy, "The
Flying Islands of the Night."

Burns never had the versatility of sympathy that enables Mr. Riley to
write such unpastoral masterpieces as "Anselmo," "The Dead Lover," "A
Scrawl," "The Home-going," some of his sonnets, and the noble verses
beginning

"A monument for the soldiers!
And what will ye build it of?"

Yet it must be owned that Burns is in general Mr. Riley's prototype. Mr.
Riley admits it himself in his charming verses "To Robert Burns."

"Sweet singer, that I lo'e the maist
O' ony, sin' wi' eager haste
I smacket bairn lips ower the taste
O' hinnied sang."

The classic pastoral poets, Theokritos, Vergandil, the others, sang with
an exquisite art, indeed, yet their farm-folk were really Dresden-china
shepherds and shepherdesses speaking with affected simplicity or with
impossible elegance. Theokritos, like Burns and Riley, wrote partly in
dialect and partly in the standard speech, and to those who are never
reconciled to anything that can quote no "authority," there should be
sufficient justification for dialect poetry in this divine Sicilian
musician of whom his own Goatherd might have said:

"Full of fine honey thy beautiful mouth was, Thyrsis, created
Full of the honeycomb; figs AEgilean, too, mayest thou nibble,
Sweet as they are; for ev'n than the locust more bravely thou singest."

I have no room to argue the _pro's_ of dialect here, but it always seems
strange that those lazy critics who are unwilling to take the trouble to
translate the occasional hard words in a dialect form of their own
tongue, should be so inconsistent as ever to study a foreign language.
Then, too, dialect is necessary to truth, to local color, to intimacy
with the character depicted. Besides, it is delicious. There is
something mellow and soul-warming about a plebeian metathesis like
"congergation." What orthoepy could replace lines like these?:

"Worter, shade and all so mixed, don't know which you'd orter
Say, th' _worter_ in the shadder--_shadder_ in the _worter_!"

One thing about Mr. Riley's dialect that may puzzle those not familiar
with the living speech of the Hoosiers, is his spelling, which is
chiefly done as if by the illiterate speaker himself. Thus
"rostneer-time" and "ornry" must be AEolic Greek to those barbarians who
have never heard of "roasting-ears" of corn or of that contemptuous
synonym for "vulgar," "common," which is smoo