At no great distance follows, with a portrait looking intensely intellectual, “the manager of the Bristol and South Wales Railway Waggon Company, Limited,” whose poems are described as “lacking here and there logical sequence and literary method,” but “evincing undoubtedly a great poetical disposition and philosophical drift.” The two poems which illustrate this poet’s genius afford very little proof either of “a great poetical disposition” or of “a philosophical drift,” but painfully conclusive proof that much more is lacking than “logical sequence and literary method,” the lack of which may certainly be conceded as well. Next comes Mr. Jonas Coaker, “the landlord of the Warren House Inn,” whose verses “disclose a poetic spirit, and, had he possessed the advantages of education, would doubtless have attracted some attention.” Mr. Coaker is in the main autobiographical. “I drew my breath first on the moor, There my forefathers dwelled; Its hills and dales I’ve traversed o’er, Its desert parts beheld. * * * * * It’s oft envelop’d in a fog, Because it’s up so high.” And Mr. Coaker continues in the same strain further than we care to transcribe. Then we have Mr. John Goodwin, “formerly a coach-guard, who sung of the days when there was such a thing, if we may so phrase it, as the poetry of locomotion.” In his poetry, we are told, “there is a genuine ring,” as here, for example:-- “I mind the time, when I was guard, The lord, the duke, or squire Would travel by the old stage-coach, Or post-chaise they would hire.” Mr. Charles Chorley, who is, we are informed, submanager of the Truro Savings Bank, in verses which are presumably a parody of Sir William Jones’ _Imitation of Alcæus_, inquires, not without a certain propriety, “What constitutes a mine?” On a par with all these are the verses of the bard who “in summer hawked gooseberries and in winter shoelaces,” and those of the “uneducated journeyman woolcomber.” Now, we need hardly say that the humble vocations of these poets are neither derogatory to them nor in any way detrimental to merit where merit exists; but there is no merit whatever in the poems assigned to them in this volume; they are simply such poems as hawkers, woolcombers, railway porters, and submanagers of provincial banks--“who pen a stanza when they should engross”--might be expected to write. The same may be said of almost every copy of verses, produced by amateurs, to be found in this collection. We have scarcely noticed a single poem which rises above mediocrity; a very large proportion are below even a mediocre standard--they are simply rubbish. In one poet only, among those whose names were not before known to us, do we discern genius, and that is in Mr. John Dryden Hosken, whose poem, entitled _My Masters_, is really excellent.