tantur_!'

Nothing can usefully be added to criticism so just, so searching, and
so happily expressed.

Some of the _London Lyrics_ have, I think, achieved what we poor
mortals call immortality--a strange word to apply to the piping of so
slender a reed, to so slight a strain--yet

'In small proportions we just beauties see.'

It is the simplest strain that lodges longest in the heart. Mr.
Locker's strains are never precisely _simple_. The gay enchantment of
the world and the sense of its bitter disappointments murmur through
all of them, and are fatal to their being simple, but the
unpretentiousness of a _London Lyric_ is akin to simplicity.

His relation to his own poetry was somewhat peculiar. A critic in
every fibre, he judged his own verses with a severity he would have
shrunk from applying to those of any other rhyming man. He was deeply
dissatisfied, almost on bad terms, with himself, yet for all that he
was convinced that he had written some very good verses indeed. His
poetry meant a great deal to him, and he stood in need of sympathy and
of allies against his own despondency. He did not get much sympathy,
being a man hard to praise, for unless he agreed with your praise it
gave him more pain than pleasure.

I am not sure that Mr. Dobson agrees with me, but I am very fond of
Locker's paraphrase of one of Clement Marot's _Epigrammes_; and as the
lines are redolent of his delicate connoisseurship, I will quote both
the original (dated 1544) and the paraphrase:

'DU RYS DE MADAME D'ALLEBRET

'Elle a tres bien ceste gorge d'albastre,
Ce doulx parler, ce cler tainct, ces beaux yeulx:
Mais en effect, ce petit rys follastre,
C'est a mon gre ce qui lui sied le mieulx;
Elle en pourroit les chemins et les lieux
Ou elle passe a plaisir inciter;
Et si ennuy me venoit contrister
Tant que par mort fust ma vie abbatue,
Il me fauldroit pour me resusciter
Que ce rys la duguel elle me tue.'

'How fair those locks which now the light wind stirs!
What eyes she has, and what a perfect arm!
And yet methinks that little laugh of hers--
That little laugh--is still her crowning charm.
Where'er she passes, countryside or town,
The streets make festa and the fields rejoice.
Should sorrow come, as 'twill, to cas