But first a word of warning.  There are perhaps some who believe that a poem should not only express high and noble thoughts, or recount great deeds, but that it should do so in verse that is musical, cadenced, rhythmical, instinct with grace, and reserved rather than boisterous.  If any such there be, let them know at once that they are hopelessly old-fashioned.  The New Poetry in its highest expression banishes form, regularity and rhythm, and treats rhyme with unexampled barbarity.  Here and there, it is true, rhymes get paired off quite happily in the conventional manner, but directly afterwards you may come upon a poor weak little rhyme who will cry in vain for his mate through half a dozen interloping lines.  Indeed, cases have been known of rhymes that have been left on a sort of desert island of a verse, and have never been fetched away.  And sometimes when the lines have got chopped very short, the rhymes have tumbled overboard altogether.  That is really what is meant by “impressionism” in poetry carried to its highest excellence.  There are, of course, other forms of the New Poetry.  There is the “blustering, hob-nailed” variety which clatters up and down with immense noise, elbows you here, and kicks you there, and if it finds a pardonable weakness strolling about in the middle of the street, immediately knocks it down and tramples upon it.  Then too there is the “coarse, but manly” kind which swears by the great god, Jingo, and keeps a large stock of spread eagles always ready to swoop and tear without the least provocation.

However, Mr. Punch may as well let his specimens speak for themselves.  Here, then, is

NO.  I.—­A GRAVESEND GREGORIAN.

BY W.E.  H-NL-Y. (CON BRIO.)

  Deep in a murky hole,
  Cavernous, untransparent, fetid, dank,
  The demiurgus of the servants’ hall,
  The scuttle-bearing buttons, boon and blank
  And grimy loads his evening load of coals,
  Filled with respect for the cook’s and butler’s rank,
  Lo, the round cook half fills the hot retreat,
  Her kitchen, where the odours of the meat,
  The cabbage and sweets all merge as in a pall,
  The stale unsavoury remnants of the feast. 
  Here, with abounding confluences of onion,
  Whose vastitudes of perfume tear the soul
  In wish of the not unpotatoed stew,
  They float and fade and flutter like morning dew. 
  And all the copper pots and pans in line,
  A burnished army of bright utensils, shine;
  And the stern butler heedless of his bunion
  Looks happy, and the tabby-cat of the house
  Forgets the elusive, but recurrent mouse
  And purrs and dreams;
  And in his corner the black-beetle seems
  A plumed Black Prince arrayed in gleaming mail;
  Whereat the shrinking scullery-maid grows pale,
  And flies for succour to THOMAS of the calves,
  Who, doing nought by halves,