If Jack goes to the bad, Mr. Justice Denman will have much to answer for.

After such a terrible example from the Bench, it is pleasant to turn to the seats reserved for Queen’s Counsel.  Mr. Cooper Willis’s Tales and Legends, if somewhat boisterous in manner, is still very spirited and clever.  The Prison of the Danes is not at all a bad poem, and there is a great deal of eloquent, strong writing in the passage beginning: 

The dying star-song of the night sinks in the dawning day, And the dark-blue sheen is changed to green, and the green fades into grey, And the sleepers are roused from their slumbers, and at last the Danesmen know How few of all their numbers are left them by the foe.

Not much can be said of a poet who exclaims: 

   Oh, for the power of Byron or of Moore,
   To glow with one, and with the latter soar.

And yet Mr. Moodie is one of the best of those South African poets whose works have been collected and arranged by Mr. Wilmot.  Pringle, the ‘father of South African verse,’ comes first, of course, and his best poem is, undoubtedly, Afar in the Desert: 

   Afar in the desert I love to ride,
   With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side: 
   Away, away, from the dwelling of men
   By the wild-deer’s haunt, by the buffalo’s glen: 
   By valleys remote where the oribi plays,
   Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
   And the kudu and eland unhunted recline
   By the skirts of grey forests o’erhung with wild vine,
   Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
   And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
   And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will
   In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.

It is not, however, a very remarkable production.

The Smouse, by Fannin, has the modern merit of incomprehensibility.  It reads like something out of The Hunting of the Snark: 

   I’m a Smouse, I’m a Smouse in the wilderness wide,
   The veld is my home, and the wagon’s my pride: 
   The crack of my ‘voerslag’ shall sound o’er the lea,
   I’m a Smouse, I’m a Smouse, and the trader is free! 
   I heed not the Governor, I fear not his law,
   I care not for civilisation one straw,
   And ne’er to ‘Ompanda’—­’Umgazis’ I’ll throw
   While my arm carries fist, or my foot bears a toe! 
   ‘Trek,’ ‘trek,’ ply the whip—­touch the fore oxen’s skin,
   I’ll warrant we’ll ‘go it’ through thick and through thin—­
   Loop! loop ye oud skellums! ot Vikmaan trek jy;
   I’m a Smouse, I’m a Smouse, and the trader is free!

The South African poets, as a class, are rather behind the age.  They seem to think that ‘Aurora’ is a very novel and delightful epithet for the dawn.  On the whole they depress us.

Chess, by Mr. Louis Tylor, is a sort of Christmas masque in which the dramatis personae consist of some unmusical carollers, a priggish young man called Eric, and the chessmen off the board.  The White Queen’s Knight begins a ballad and the Black King’s Bishop completes it.  The Pawns sing in chorus and the Castles converse with each other.  The silliness of the form makes it an absolutely unreadable book.