book should be carefully studied.  As for the general reader who, we fear, is not as a rule interested in the question of ‘multiple control,’ if he is a sportsman, he will find in El Magreb a capital account of pig-sticking; if he is artistic, he will be delighted to know that the importation of magenta into Morocco is strictly prohibited; if criminal jurisprudence has any charms for him, he can examine a code that punishes slander by rubbing cayenne pepper into the lips of the offender; and if he is merely lazy, he can take a pleasant ride of twelve hundred miles in Mr. Stutfield’s company without stirring out of his armchair.

El Magreb:  Twelve Hundred Miles’ Ride through Morocco.  By Hugh Stutfield. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)

THE CHILDREN OF THE POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886.)

The idea of this book is exceedingly charming.  As children themselves are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection of the best poems written on children should be the most perfect of all anthologies.  Yet, the book itself is not by any means a success.  Many of the loveliest child-poems in our literature are excluded and not a few feeble and trivial poems are inserted.  The editor’s work is characterised by sins of omission and of commission, and the collection, consequently, is very incomplete and very unsatisfactory.  Andrew Marvell’s exquisite poem The Picture of Little T. C., for instance, does not appear in Mr. Robertson’s volume, nor the Young Love of the same author, nor the beautiful elegy Ben Jonson wrote on the death of Salathiel Pavy, the little boy-actor of his plays.  Waller’s verses also, To My Young Lady Lucy Sidney, deserve a place in an anthology of this kind, and so do Mr. Matthew Arnold’s lines To a Gipsy Child, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee, a little lyric full of strange music and strange romance.  There is possibly much to be said in favour of such a poem as that which ends with

   And I thank my God with falling tears
   For the things in the bottom drawer: 

but how different it is from

   I was a child, and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea;
   But we loved with a love that was more than love—­
      I and my Annabel Lee;
   With a love that the winged Seraphs of Heaven
      Coveted her and me

The selection from Blake, again, is very incomplete, many of the loveliest poems being excluded, such as those on The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found, the Cradle Song, Infant Joy, and others; nor can we find Sir Henry Wotton’s Hymn upon the Birth of Prince Charles, Sir William Jones’s dainty four-line epigram on The Babe, or the delightful lines To T. L. H., A Child, by Charles Lamb.

The gravest omission, however, is certainly that of Herrick.  Not a single poem of his appears in Mr. Robertson’s collection.  And yet no English poet has written of children with more love and grace and delicacy.  His Ode on the Birth of Our Saviour, his poem To His Saviour, A Child:  A Present by a Child, his Graces for Children, and his many lovely epitaphs on children are all of them exquisite works of art, simple, sweet and sincere.