LECTURE II.

PROVINCIAL POETRY.

WHEN Monsieur De Talleyrand, if Monsieur De Talleyrand it were who is the author of the well-known saying, amused an ultra-civilized company of wits and diplomatists by telling them that speech was first given to man in order that he might conceal his thoughts, it is probable that he had in his mind Parisian French, Queen's English, very choice Italian, Attic Greek, Ciceronian Latin, and the like: that kind of diction, in a word, to which are liable, more or less, most of those books that no gentleman's library ought to be without. One main reason, in the opposite direction, which leads me to speak here of provincial poetry and provincial poets, is my belief that this celebrated sarcasm does not apply to those rustic dialects which have never diluted themselves, like the expanding circles of a pond, over the wide surface of literary com

monplace. The words in use among uneducated men are (I imagine) but few; they accommodate themselves to the every-day topics and elementary passions which make up the daily life of the village or the farm. The same subjects of conversation, if conversation it can be called, recur at the same times, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year. And the talk of the alehouse, or the blacksmith's shop, seldom passes out far beyond them. Hence when a labourer, still more when a labourer's wife, happens to possess an energetic understanding, a lively imagination, or a vehement temper, she has to struggle up to eloquence by making all the language within reach bend under her till it cracks. Every phrase is, as it were, doubleshotted with meaning. Vivid metaphors are pressed into their place, not to decorate a sentence, not to round a period, but, with the true object of all such illustrations, to quicken and fortify the sense. pounces upon them, and drags them towards her from every quarter, so that she may bridge over the shortest road home to the hearts and intellects of her audience. Such a woman I met not so very long ago in one of our northern districts. She was boiling up with eager wrath against an oppressive squire, who, according to her, had treated a deserving tenant with shameless

She

injustice. It was clear that pour out her emotions upon somebody she must; and perhaps it occurred to her that I, as a stranger and a bird of passage, was a safer confidant than any of her particular friends. I know nothing of the facts of the case, and therefore neither acquit nor condemn the supposed delinquent. Her story, at any rate, ran thus:-The tenant in question was one who, like Tennyson's Northern Farmer, had a passionate sense of his duty to the land. If she represented him truly, he worked early and late, paying his rent to a moment, and improving his fields with a zeal that never slackened, not so much in the hope of conciliating his landlord, or of increasing his worldly substance, as to feel his life keen within him, and to satisfy the natural instincts of his soul. But though admirable in these respects, he was not altogether the discreetest of men, or, as she put it, 'He wor an oonhandy kind of chap, who let his toongue wagg in pooblic-hoose.' Now this ill-advised wagging of the tongue, in that dangerous part of the hamlet, unhappily set in motion certain scandals, of which it is unnecessary to say more, than that the lord of the manor objected to their public discussion among his humbler neighbours. Some pickthank contrived to let the little great man know what had taken place, and

E

he, so she informed me, was ungenerous enough to wreak a mean revenge. All this she flung forth in her fiery Yorkshire, which crackled and rung as she gave it out, (Yorkshire, compared with which my pottering dictionary-English is as the outer to the inner rainbow,) and ended her impassioned declamation (of the truth or justice of which, I repeat, I know nothing) in the following words: He broake him in no time at a'. He blaacked him reet awa'. Now you or I should probably have said, he never rested till he had accomplished his ruin, or some such platitude. This woman, however, had but little of such Norman-English at command. From her very poverty she was compelled to make herself rich. From her very incapacity to find ordinary words, strong enough to hold her meaning, she was forced into a noble image; at least by the power of that phrase, 'He blaacked him reet awa',' she has left, sculptured on my imagination ever since, the form of her sorrowing friend, walled round, without a gleam of sunshine, by the darkness of despair, buried alive, so to speak, under the gloom of his unmerited misfortunes.

On another occasion, a stalwart ploughman, believing in himself, and honourably conscious that he never gave less than a day's work for a day's wages,