in this man. He begins as a journalist of genius, and as a journalist of genius he seems fated to end. 'Culture' stands to the author of Life's Handicap as it did to the author of Soldiers Three, merely as 'culchaw.' In Barrack-Room Ballads we shall learn that 'art' is a mere barren device of the sardonic Satan, which is, at any rate, some change on Departmental Ditties, where we shall not find it at all. And as a practical comment on this, we have a regular tiara of gems like
'Thence the tale
Comes westward o'er the peaks of In-di-a'!
It was the same with his fiction. 'Krishna Mulvaney' heads the list of his last volume, and the 'Lang Men o' Larut' turns up naked and unashamed among its wedding guests. On this occasion the matter is one chiefly of technique. But technique, we know, is something more, far more, than a trick of hand, and in other cases we can be sure that we shall find the crying want of it manifesting itself in a writer's essential qualities of spirit and intellect.
Over a third of these ditties are good of their kind, light, bright, and readable, the verse which in the hours of our teased weariness of work it is pleasant and sometimes not altogether unprofitable to have at hand. One sample will suffice—a sample of the
