BOOKS.

A VILLAGE PORTRAIT GALLERY.*

"To all lovers of the rural life of Old England, this little book is respectfully dedicated, by the author." Such is the modest inscription on the title-page of this small volume ; and being ourselves cf the number of those for whom it is thus intended, and believing that the same may be said of the great majority of our readers, we are only doing a duty for which we look for their thanks, in very heartily commending it to them. It is seldom indeed that one comes across verses so genuinely "flavouring of the soil," and io wholesome and bright in alb other respects. Those with which it opens, and from which its name is taken, are a series of portraits of village worthies.. "The Miller," "Hedger and Ditcher," "Ploughman," "Wood- mans" " Tasker " (or "thresher," as he is more often called), "Carpenter," and "Shepherd," follow one another in Mr. Lucas's gallery, and we are fairly puzzled to say which of them seems to us most lifelike. Probably each of us will choose the one which brings back most vividly the particular rustic craftsman whom he watched admiringly, almost • Sketches of Rural Life, and other Poems, By Francis Lucas. Landau Macmillan.

reverently, in his own native village as a boy. Peihapen our own case this would apply to "The Miller," the man with the mealy face, leaning over the hatch as he stands at the door of the mill, while- " light winds fan the meads, And along the reaches of the stream Sweetly whisper the flags and reeds, Sweetly the willows wave and gleam ; And hark ! the idle cuckoo's voice Is bidding the woods and fields rejoice For that life is only a sunny dream;" for our village miller happened to be a son of Anak, like him of whom Mr. Lucas sings :— "The miller I wot was on the spot At the serving out of backs, For I'm bold to say that the one he's got Could carry at least two sacks, Nor half so much resent the weight As his pocket would a threepenny rate, Or a call for income-tax."

But yet, as we go on to one after another, we are driven to suspend judgment. For just look at this of "The Hedger and the Ditcher," and call to mind the dismay with which, as a small boy, you realised the disappearance of one of the beloved straggling hedges, where dog-roses and honeysuckle grew, and there was a chaffinch's or thrush's nest every few yards :—

"Where the ragged fence runs up the hill,

With the thick gloves on his hands, Busy with hook and billet and bill, Yonder the hedger stands.

And he clenches and wrenches, and wattles and twists The stubborn stems by the strength of his wrists, As if they were hempen strands : And the brier whose laughing roses swung In June's delicious breath, And the thorn where the linnet perched and sung To his mate on her nest beneath, And the berries of waxen pink that blush On the spindle-wood's tender spray, Those merciless hands will lop and crush Wherever they come in his way ; But before he's finished it all along, He'll make it a job to see, Clean and trimmed, and splashed and strong, And hardly as high as your knee."

Then] comes "The Ploughman," perhaps the most cheery of them all, with the lad who drives for him, who can "troll a song or two," and whom we meet first in October,— " Where the long, clean furrow goes, Close to the edge of the melting snows."

in anticipation of- " The still, clear nights of winter, Which shall find us harrowed and rolled, And sting the sods, and make the clods As mellow as garden mould.

Then we must get the yard-stuff out, And before the winter's through, Candlemas weather will bring us together, With work for the ploughs to do."

And then again in the spring, when- " The long clean furrow goes Followed by the shining crows, And when I come to the headland, And hoist the ploughshare out, I love to see how cleverly He'll bring his team about."

A different man altogether is the solitary "Woodman," who has none of the farmer's men or boys to help him along, or harvest-homes to look forward to. But,—

" The leaves have dropped from the summer shoots,

And the drowsy sap is down in the roots, And the squirrel is rolled in his tail : 'Time to shut up,' says the wood-louse ;

'Fasten the door,' says the snail ; (dale." And 'out and away,' says the woodman, and over hill and

For,—

" The woodman's harvest is long about, It comes in the little days, For him no harvest moon shines out, No harvest home with song and shout And feast his toil repays.

Cold sighs the wind round the faggot stack When he shoulders his wallet and hies him back, Followed along the forest track By the scream of the angry jays.

. ..... . . . And oh for the wood, the moan of the wood, When the cold is waxing strong, And the grey sod shrinks as the dry wind bites, And about the tracks like troubled sprites The dead leaves troop along."

We have only apace to look in for a moment at the " Tasker " in his barn, from which he looks out on the farm-yard, with the grand old trees standing round it on guard, and thinks it" the prettiest sight that ever a body saw," as he tosses the " cavings " to heifer and hog and speckled hen, who are waiting round about, but must just note how— "The rats and mice I often hear As they squeak and scuttle about; I guess they've got some neighbours near They'd rather be without.

For here the fierce old tom-cat hides, And the barn-owl snores and blinks, And between the sheaves the weasel glides, And into the holes and chinks."

The old" Carpenter," evidently a favourite-friend of Mr. Lucas, is dead, so we must pass him by :— " For the sigh of his saw and the sweep of his plane

We shall never hear again, And the shavings on his workshop floor Shall rustle under his feet no more.

Borne, bome, borne, borne, Carry the carpenter to his long home.

Last comes "The Shepherd," from whom we get again, as from the ploughman, the contrast of the work in winter and spring. "We shepherds" who are out in the long nights see God's wonders more than most :— " We see his shining messengers

That glide about among the stars, And the crimson flush and the golden gleams, And the pale streamers shooting high Along the bridge of the northern sky, That come and pass away like dreams.

And what good shepherds saw and heard One winter's night long time ago, Is written in God's holy word.

For simple shepherd folk were first to know When the great Shepherd came to dwell below."

But, alter all, the springtime is for him, as for all others, the joy of the year :— "When the primrose tufts are bathed in dew,

And the skylarks carol up in the blue, And the young lambs scamper, and bound, and prance, As if they didn't know what to be at, They are so jolly and bold and fat ; And over the waters the sunbeams dance, And the lapwings toy upon the gale, And the cuckoo answers the sound of the flail : Oh, in the merry time of spring The shepherd's life is the life of a king."

And surely all staunch readers of the Spectator will appreciate this on the most intelligent and faithful, though tailless, of our canine friends :— "Well, there's my old dog 'Ball' and I,

We could tell you something of wind and weather, Through hot and cold and wet and dry We've shepherded some few years together.

Yonder he lies upon the sack With the bottle and lanthorn at his back, But if I should begin to tell you all Of the knowing ways of my old dog 'Ball,' I'm sure before I got half through, You'd say, 'Come, come, that can't be true !' "

In parting from the charming companionship of Mr. Lucas's village worthies, we can only hope that the present generation —when the love of his work seems to have departed from the average working man—continue of the same temper in his neighbourhood as those of whom he sings so sympathetically.

We have left ourselves no space to notice the other poems, but can assure our readers that they will reward perusal down to the very end of the volume, which winds up with an epis- tolary correspondence of two young Evangelical sisters over a love-affair. The-elder, Elira, who has been (unless we misread her) jilted by the curate, and is thinking of an early grave, gets happily engaged to a young Captain, whose epistle con-

fiding his secret to a comrade, with strict injunctions not to let

it out at mess, ends :--

"And then there'll be hemmings and havrings prodigious,

For they say the Miss Neville are very religious. Qonfound all hypocrisy, canting, and sham, But a girl without piety ain't worth a damn."

We hear with regret that Mr. Lucas has reached the Psalmist's allotted span of three-score years and ten, during some forty of which these poems have been lying in his desk. If so, sorrow that we have been so long deprived unnecessarily of the acquaintance of his rural worthies mingles with the pleasure of this late introduction. While, therefore, in these blatant days, we are, as a rule, at one with Parson Wilbur in "reverencing as highest author him whose works continue heroically unwritten," or rather unpublished, we have still our hopeful word for those who, like this rural singer, have at last, and with a modesty as pleasant as it is unusual, put on permanent record "the thing that is revealed" to them.