" There
the Theocritus of the West dares to use not merely the words of common
speech and primitive origin, but words drawn from Low Latin and of
administrative connotation. Barnes achieves this triumph in words with
perfect ease. He can use a word like "parish" not, as Crabbe did, for
purposes of pure narration but in a passage of heightened rhetoric:
But when you be a-lost vrom the parish, zome more Will come on in your
pleazen to bloom an' to die; An' the zummer will always have maidens
avore Their doors, vor to chatty an' zee volk goo by.
For daughters ha' mornen when mothers ha' night, An' there's beauty
alive when the fairest is dead; As when one sparklen wave do zink down
from the light, Another do come up an' catch it instead.
Rightly did the Edinburgh reviewer of the 'thirties, in noticing Barnes's
poems--the very edition from which I was reading, perfect, by the way,
in its ribbed paper and clear print--declare "there has been no such art
since Horace." And here I may interpolate that the reviewer in question
was Mr. George Venables, who was within a year to become a friend of
mine. He and his family were close friends of my wife's people, and when
after my marriage I met him, a common love of Barnes brought together
the ardent worshipper of the new schools of poetry, for such I was, and
the old and distinguished lawyer who was Thackeray's contemporary at the
Charterhouse.
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