Altogether in civilised lands there is no great crop of fine poetry directly referring, like the innumerable chants of barbarous bards, to wars contemporary with the poet. Modern bards have, on the whole, succeeded better in retrospective war poetry. Of this kind is all the war part of Shakespeare's plays; his themes were furnished by the wars of ancient Rome, of Henry V. in France, and the Wars of the Roses. His contemporary, Michael Drayton, wrote an admirable war-poem in this retrospective kind, The 'Battle of Agincourt,' fought two centuries before his time.* 'Upon Saint Crispin's day

Fought was this noble fray,
Which fame did not delay
To England to carry.

'O, when shall Englishmen
With such acts fill a pen,
Or England breed again
Such a King Harry?'

Not while a nervous Scotch pedant sits on the throne, the truly English poet may have desired to intimate in this closing stanza.

Walter Scott was singularly unsuccessful in his attempts to celebrate the martial exploits of his own contemporaries. He failed where his less great countryman, Campbell, succeeded. No one could compare Scott's poem on Waterloo with his ballad of the Red Harlaw,' or his gay Bonny 'Dundee.' Only when distance lends enchantment to the 'view' is Scott really inspired. But no doubt the military animation of his own day gave mettle to one of the best battle pictures in verse, the Flodden scenes in Marmion.' He is said to have composed them while galloping about the Portobello sands during the camp-out of the mounted volunteer corps to which he belonged. With what imagination and vigour that fight is described, from the first view caught of the position by the English lord, arriving just in timethrough the wavering fortunes of battle-till the canto dies away with the splashing through Tweed of many a broken band, on their way to spread the dismal news of the disaster,

'Where shivered was fair Scotland's spear,
And broken was her shield.'

One cannot visit Flodden, so untouched and unchanged to

this day, without seeing the fight as Sir Walter imagined it. One sees Marmion ride up to Lord Surrey by the tiny Norman church of Branxton hamlet, rein in his horse, salute, and receive instructions.

""The good Lord Marmion, by my life!

Welcome to danger's hour!

Short greeting serves in time of strife:
Thus have I ranged my power:
Myself will rule this central host,

Stout Stanley fronts their right,
My sons command the vanward post
With Brian Tunstall, stainless knight.
Lord Dacre, with his horsemen light,
Shall be in rearward of the fight,
And succour those that need it most.
Now, gallant Marmion, well I know,
Would gladly to the vanguard go;
Edmund, the Admiral, Tunstall there,
With thee their charge will blithely share;
There fight thy own retainers too,
Beneath De Burg, thy steward true."

"Thanks, noble Surrey !" Marmion said.'

A scene in the amusing and interesting autobiography of stout Sir Harry Smith, a warrior of the real old English breed, shows how true Scott is to life. Major Smith, coming from the American campaign, arrived on the field of Waterloo, by what he would doubtless have called 'damned ' good luck,' just in time for the fight on the 18th of June, a fine morning after the soaking rain of the night. He was sent forward by his brigadier to get instructions from the Duke.

'About 11 o'clock I found His Grace and all his staff near Hougomont. The day was beautiful after the storm, though the country was very heavy. When I rode up, he said, "Hallo, Smith, where are you from last? "From General Lambert's Brigade, and they from America." "What have you got?" "The 4th, the 27th, and the 40th; the 81st remain in Brussels." "Ah, I know, I know, but the others; are they in good order?" "Excellent, my lord, and very strong." "That's all right, for I shall soon want every man." One of his staff said, "I do not think they will attack to-day." sense," said the Duke, "the columns are already forming, and I think I have discovered where the weight of the attack will be made. I shall be attacked before an hour. Do you know anything of my position, Smith?" "Nothing, my lord, beyond what I see-the general line, and right and left." "Go back and halt Lambert's Brigade at the junction of the two great roads from Genappe and Nivelles. Did you observe their junction as you rode up? "Particularly, my lord."

"Non

"Having halted the head of the brigade, and told Lambert what I desire, ride to the left of the position. On the extreme left is the Nassau Brigade, those fellows who came over to us at Arbonne, you recollect. Between them and Picton's division (now the 5th) I shall most probably require Lambert. There is already there a brigade of newly raised Hanoverians, which Lambert will give orders to, as they and your brigade form the 6th Division. You are the only British staff officer with it. Find out, therefore, the best and shortest road from where Lambert is now halted to the left of Picton and to the right of the Nassau troops. Do you understand?" "Perfectly, my lord." I had barely turned from His Grace when he called me back. "Now, clearly understand that when Lambert is ordered to move from the fork of the two roads where he is now halted, you are prepared to conduct him to Picton's left." It was delightful to see His Grace that morning, on his noble horse Copenhagen, in high spirits, and very animated, but so cool and so clear in the issue of his orders, it was impossible not fully to comprehend what he said; delightful also to observe what his wonderful eye anticipated, while some of his staff were of opinion the attack was not in progress.'

Macaulay wrote verse with as much vigour as he wrote prose. His historical war-poetry has now been declaimed by several generations of boys, and should surely please boys for ever. The 'Lays of Rome,' The Armada,'' Naseby,' and Henry of Navarre' are in this class. No Englishman, at any age, can read the Armada alarum without emotion. The other poems, perhaps, do not altogether fulfil Newman's definition of a classic, for, while they enchant boyhood, they less please the more fastidious taste of maturity. They lack the subtle distinction of fine poetry. If one compares Macaulay's Naseby' with Scott's Cavalier lyric, 'Heaven 'shield the brave gallants who fight for the Crown,' one certainly feels that in Macaulay the vintage is less fine. But if Macaulay's poems, like his prose, lack something of the more delicate aroma, yet they, also like his prose, are crowded with knowledge and full of life. Macaulay, in prose and verse, marshals and handles his armies of facts with consummate ease and power, like a commander of the first order. What a magnificently concise and rapid survey of England from Cornwall to Kent, and from Kent to Carlisle, is contained in The Armada'! Here are some stages in the swift march :

The fisher left his skiff to rock on Tamar's glittering waves:
The rugged miners poured to war from Mendip's sunless caves:
O'er Longleat's towers, o'er Cranbourne's oaks, the fiery herald flew :
He roused the shepherds of Stonehenge, the rangers of Beaulieu.
Right sharp and quick the bells all night rang out from Bristol town,
And, ere the day, three hundred horse had met on Clifton down.'

The six lines summon up in the brain eight different scenes and associations as rapidly as a skilled pianist can throw off different chords from his instrument.

Returning once more to Scotland, one cannot forget Aytoun's pathetic and beautiful Burial March of Dundee,' the echo of a lost cause.

The poets of the Young Ireland school produced some good poems inspired by the memory of past valours, rebel or exile valours, it is true. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff has rightly included in his agreeable Victorian Anthology''The 'Irish Brigade' of Thomas Davis :

'They fought as they revelled, fast, fiery, and true,
And, though victors, they left on the field not a few,
And they who survived fought and drank as of yore,
But the land of their heart's hope they never saw more,
For in far, foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade,
Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade.'

And there is an Irish charm and music about John Casey's rebel poem, "The Rising of the Moon,' which celebrates the miserable insurrection of the downtrodden Catholic peasants in 1798-so heroic, so stained by atrocities, and so savagely suppressed :

"O, then, tell me, Shawn O'Ferrall, tell me why you hurry so?” "Hush, ma bouchal, hush, and listen," and his cheeks were all aglow;

"I bear orders from the Captain,-get you ready quick and soon; For the pikes must be together at the risin' of the moon.' "O, then, tell me Shawn O'Ferrall, where the gath'rin' is to be?" "At the old spot by the river, right well known to you and me; One word more for signal token, whistle up the marchin' tune, With your pike upon your shoulder, by the risin' of the moon."

In our own days the memory of England's naval glories has found admirable expression in some poems by Mr. Henry Newbolt, who, like Campbell (but more to the realistic side of the line), holds his path between the extreme abstract and realistic schools. Nothing could be better in this way than his 'Drake's Drum,' or his 'Ballad of the • Bold Menelaus: '

'It was morning at St. Helen's, in the great and gallant days,
And the sea beneath the sun glittered wide,

When the frigate set her courses, all a shimmer in the haze,
And she hauled her cable home, and took the tide.

‹ She'd a right fighting company, three hundred men and more,
Nine and forty guns in tackle running free,

And they cheered her from the shore for her colours at the fore
When the bold Menelaus put to sea.

Mr. Newbolt is by no means a mere war-poet. He always writes with fine taste, as well as with ardour and spirit, and has a very distinct style of his own.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling has invented a style and discovered a subject-matter, and has, like Pope and Tennyson before him, founded a school. One hears his echoes everywhere. This proves the originality of his genius. He is the discoverer who inaugurates a new line in the poetic traderoutes. Mr. Kipling suddenly brought down poetry from the high cliffs upon which it had been kept by the Tennysonian school to the familiar levels of streets, and barracks, and ship-decks; he won the heart of an immense public, and he extended the influence of poetry. He did in poetry that which Macaulay did in history, making his themes seem really like plain and visible life. Mr. Kipling has not much used his lyre (he would probably prefer to call it his banjo) to celebrate specific deeds of old, or battles of today. He has translated into verse with extraordinary fidelity and skill the view taken of life by the unlettered Englishman of the roving disposition, the kind of man, a rough idealist in his own way, who becomes soldier, sailor, rancher, denizen of mining camps, who may be found taking the chances of life with the same ironical stoicism in every land and on every sea.

says the new Ulysses.

Here, now, by way of contrast with the classic battlepieces which we have quoted, is a picture by Mr. Kipling of a British regiment of the line going into action. 'E,' in the first line, is the sergeant, that cement of the army :

"'E knows each talkin' corpril that leads a squad astray,

'E feels 'is innards 'eavin, 'is bowels givin' way;

'E sees the blue-white faces all tryin' 'ard to grin,

An' 'e stands an' waits an' suffers till it's time to cap 'em in.

'An' now the hugly bullets come peckin' through the dust,
An' no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must;
So, like a man in irons, which isn't glad to go,
They moves 'em off by companies uncommon stiff an' slow.

'An' now it's "Oo goes backward?" an' now it's "Oo comes on ? " An' now it's "Get the doolies," an' now "The captain's gone; An' now it's "bloody murder," but all the while they 'ear 'Is voice, the same as barrack drill, a shepherding to rear.'