by chastened sentiment, and often playful. The tone should not be pitched high; it should be terse and idiomatic, and rather in the conversational key; the rhythm should be crisp and sparkling, and the rhyme. frequent and never forced, while the entire poem should be marked by tasteful moderation, high finish and completeness; for, however trivial the subjectmatter may be, indeed, rather in proportion to its triviality, subordination to the rules of composition, and perfection of execution, are of the utmost importance. The definition may be illustrated by a few examples of pieces which, from the absence of some of the foregoing qualities, or from the excess of others, cannot be properly claimed as Occasional Verse, though they may bear a certain generic resemblance to it. The ballad of John Gilpin, for instance, is too broadly humorous; Swift's On the Death of Marlborough, and Byron's Windsor Poetics are too satirical and savage; Cowper's My Mary is too pathetic; Herrick's lyrics to Blossoms and to Daffodils are too serious; Sally in our Alley is, perhaps, too homely, and too entirely simple and natural, though I should like to have included it; while Pope's Rape of the Lock, which is one of the finest specimens of light verse in any language, must be excluded on account of its length. I should have liked to have added one or two of his exquisite personal compliments, but they might have seemed too fragmentary.

Every piece which has been selected for this volume cannot be expected to exhibit all the characteristics above enumerated, but the qualities of brevity and buoyancy are absolutely essential. The poem may be tinctured with a well-bred philosophy, it may be

whimsically sad, it may be gay and gallant, it may be playfully malicious or tenderly ironical, it may display lively banter, and it may be satirically facetious; it may even, considering it merely as a work of art, be pagan in its philosophy or trifling in its tone, but it must never be flat, or ponderous, or common-place.

Having thus fixed upon a definition, the Editor proceeded to put it to a practical use, by submitting it as a touchstone to the various pieces which came under his notice. In the first place it is scarcely necessary to say that all poetry of a strictly religious character, on account of the singleness and earnestness of its tone, is inadmissible in a collection where jest and earnest are inextricably intermingled. All pieces of quasi fashionable jingle have been excluded, because they are usually trashy and vulgar. Some of our best writers of Occasional Verse are not merely tinged with coarseness, they seem to delight in it, and often show much raciness in their revelry, but they are hardly ever vulgar. Vulgarity appears to be a rock on which so many would-be verse writers have suffered, and will continue to suffer, shipwreck.

Fables, prologues, rhymed anecdotes, and pieces of purely ephemeral or personal interest, such as satirical or political squibs, have been generally rejected, as well as those pieces which expand into real song or crystallise into mere epigram, though in these cases, as already observed, the border line is often extremely difficult to define. Riddles, parodies, and punning couplets are for the most part omitted; not, as some readers may suppose, because they are contemptible, for nothing is contemptible that is really good of its kind; but because they do not, strictly speaking, come

within the scope of this work.

The few which are

inserted possess an unusual breadth of feeling, or a delicacy of treatment, which elevates them beyond the range of mere epigram, riddle, and parody.

Some epitaphs have been admitted, their epigrammatic character rendering them more elegant and ingenious than solemn or affecting; and a few pieces of gracefully turned nonsense will be found towards the end of the volume, of which The Broken Dish may be cited as a fair specimen. Mr. Hood was very happy in this kind of composition, where a conceit is built up on some pointed absurdity.

Occasional Verse should seem to be entirely spontaneous: when the reader thinks to himself, "I could have written that, and easily, too," he pays the author a very high compliment, but, at the same time, it is right to observe, that this absence of effort, as recognised in most works of real excellence, is only apparent; the writing of Occasional Verse is a difficult accomplishment, for a large number of authors, both famous and obscure, have attempted it, but in the great majority of cases with very indifferent success, and no one has fully succeeded who did not possess a certain gift of irony, which is not only a much rarer quality than humour, or even wit, but is less commonly met with than is sometimes imagined. This frequent liability to failure will excite less surprise if it be borne in mind that the possession of the true poetic faculty is not of itself sufficient to guarantee capacity for this inferior branch of the art of versification. The writer of Occasional Verse, in order to be genuinely successful, must not only be something of a poet, but he must also be a man of the world, in the liberal sense of the

expression; he must have associated throughout his life with the refined and cultivated members of his species, not merely as an idle bystander, but as a busy actor in the throng. A professional poet will seldom write the best vers de société, just because writing is the business of his life, and because he has something better to do. It appears to be an essential characteristic of these brilliant trifles, that they should be thrown off in the leisure moments of men whose lives are devoted to more stirring pursuits. Swift was an ardent politician; Prior, a zealous ambassador; Suckling, Praed, and Landor, were essentially men of action; even Cowper was no recluse, but a man of the world, forced by mental infirmity into a state of modified seclusion. Indeed, it may be affirmed of most of the authors quoted in this volume-and it is curious to see what a large proportion of them are men of a certain social position-that they submitted their intellects to the monotonous grindstone of worldly business, and that their poetical compositions were like the sparks which fly off and prove the generous quality of the metal thus applied; and it must be remembered, to pursue the simile, that but for the dull grindstone, however finely tempered the metal might be, there would be no sparks at all: in other words, the writer of such compositions needs perpetual contact with the world.

I will quote here what the late Rev. Dr. J. Hannah says, in the Preface to his "Courtly Poets," for, in a measure, his remarks apply to the present collection :

"There are scarcely half-a-dozen pieces in this volume which we owe to poets by profession. Most

of these poems are little more than the comparatively idle words of busy men, whose end 'was not writing, even while they wrote;' these occasional sayings, in which the character often reveals itself more clearly than in studied language. There is a special charm in compositions which have amused the leisure of distinguished persons, who have won their spurs in very different fields; of statesmen, soldiers, students, and divines, who have used metre as the mere outlet for transitory feelings, to give grace to a compliment, or terseness to the expression of a sudden emotion, or point and beauty to a calm reflection. To a great extent, such poems are likely to be imitative; and in that aspect they form a curiously exact measure of the influence exerted by a style or fashion. But several of the pieces which are brought together here may claim a higher rank than this."

The Editor trusts that he has gathered together nearly all the Occasional Verse of real merit in the English language, at the same time he almost hopes that the cultivated reader will find hardly anything altogether unknown to him. The Editor is of opinion that hitherto verse of real excellence and buoyancy has been seldom very long lost sight of; in other words, that an unknown piece of such verse probably does not deserve to become better known. The contents of the volume have been selected and winnowed from an enormous mass of inferior rhyme of the same kind, the great bulk of which did not appear of sufficient merit to deserve special preservation.

Many pieces, however, have been pondered over, and at last discarded with regret. Several, indeed, have been found, whose rejection was especially tanta