instinct with the sympathies of their daily life, and the better feelings which prompt their usual actions. Such poetry perhaps can only flow from a real worker like Frank Lott, a man whose daily toil earns his daily bread, in whom poetry, instead of producing aspirations after personal greatness, or clouding his mind with discontent and foreboding, is a source of joy and happiness-a relief at once intellectual and moral to the physical toil by which he lives.

The apostles of the poetry of labour must come from among the labourers, they must have the straightforwardness and the earnestness which would almost seem the birthright of those who toil, they must have a high sense of the real dignity of work, a dependence upon industry and perseverance, and a faith in the truth of the poetry of real life.

We find these qualities in this handsome little volume of a "Hundred Sonnets." Here for example is the answer of a true worker to those who would divorce toil from poetry:

"Why worldlings! I'm as proud to wield the axe,
As I am happy I can guide the pen

To frame a sonnet-and return again

To a day's toil, that would disjoint the necks
Of half your dandy poets."

In Frank Lott, as in almost all men who think from the heart rather than the head, we find the family feelings almost overpoweringly strong, mingling themselves with every thought and sentiment, and shedding a glow of love over all, and, as their result, we have here several beautiful sonnets to the poet's friends and relations. For his mother he has that earnest affection and deep reverence which is a sure mark of a true child-like mind. She is to him one of whom he says:

"My best affections still to thee incline,
Thy breast has been to me a holy shrine,
Where love unselfish, glowing gratitude,
With all that makes us kind, or leaves us good,
In one unchanging sentiment combine."

"Were fame to weave a garland round my head,

I could not look on labour with disdain."

This is the right kind of healthy poetry for the masses, for while it lifts them to love beauty and to have high aspirations for the future, it rivets their attention to the necessity for present effort. We may be sure that Frank Lott will add example to precept, and not become amenable to his own just censure, thus expressed :

"And he's a prodigal who wasteth time
In profitless, unmeaning solitude,
Who but devotes his days to making rhyme:
When Fancy's dreams on serious cares intrude,
The negligence is little short of crime."

but that he will by truthfully working out his life, make it a higher poem than he can ever write.

We heartily wish this "little book" success, and that the labour of the earnest-minded writer will be light enough, to enable him to strew his and our paths with more of the wild flowers of poetry.

WIT AND HUMOUR.

Wit was originally a general name for all the intellectual powers, meaning the faculty which kens, perceives, knows, understands; it was gradually narrowed in its signification, to express merely the resemblance between ideas; and lastly, to note that resemblance when it occasioned ludicrous surprise. It marries ideas, lying wide apart, by a sudden jerk of the understanding. Humour originally meant moisture--a signification it metaphorically retains-for it is the very juice of the mind, oozing from the brain, and enriching and fertilizing wherever it falls. Wit exists by antipathy; Humour by sympathy. Wit laughs at things; Humour laughs with them. Wit lashes external appearances, or cunningly exaggerates single foibles into character; Humour glides into the heart of its object, looks lovingly on the infirmities it detects, and represents the whole man. Wit is abrupt, darting, scornful, and tosses its analogies in your face; Humour is slow and shy, insinuating its fun into your heart. Wit is negative, analytical, destructive; Humour

"Ties like ours

Were gentle influences, yea, holy powers To gladden life, to soothe or banish care."

Panza is a humorous creation. Wit, when earnest, has the earnestness of passion, seeking to destroy; Humour has the earnestness of affection, and would lift up what is seemingly low into our charity and love. Wit, bright,

"He who takes

And calls thee his entirely, robs not me
Of one of thine affections, but awakes
Another chord of kindly sympathy."

The only gloomy strain of thought in the book is one arising out of a fine appreciation and a deep love of Nature. Born and nurtured amid the fairest rural scenes, breathing the pure atmosphere which surrounds the hills of Kent, he cannot bear

"To be awoke

Morn after morn, through clatter in the street; To rise and grind hard granite 'neath the feet, Then breathe its particles and swallow smoke, And feel ere breakfast, as if one would choke." Then comes the longing for-

"My early home,

And the green meadows where I loved to roam."

and he begs his mother in her letters,

"To send a daisy with a crimson tip,'
Or deep blue violet, or primrose pale,
Or wood anemone, or wild oxlip,
Or dearer still, a lily of the vale."

But this sensibility never becomes morbid, it never sinks into maudlin, and when the mild regret has passed, "It gives no pain

The path of honest industry to tread."

vanishes in an instant: Humour, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light. Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines; Humour implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic, and the true, by whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is a humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence, promoting tolerant views of life, bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble. Old Dr. Fuller's remark, that a negro is "the image of God cut in ebony," is humorous; Horrace Smith's inversion of it, "the taskmaster is the image of the devil cut in ivory," is witty. Wit can co-exist with fierce and malignant passions; but Humour demands good feeling and fellow-feeling; feeling not merely for what is above us, but for what is around and beneath us. When Wit and Humour are commingled, the result is a genial sharpness, dealing with its object somewhat as old Izaak Walton dealt with the frog he used for bait-running the hook neatly through his mouth and out at his gills, and in so doing using him as though he loved him!" Sydney Smith and Shakspere's "Touchstone" are exam

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