Years ago, there passed through the writer’s hand a small collection of verse—if verse it might be called—in quality, the most dreary and antipathetic, possible—sectarian hymns, full of phrases, the intimate sense of which can never have pierced to the mind of their maker. This was a poor creature in a hospital, who had been found on a harsh January night, frozen into the kennel where she had fallen, and who paid for that night’s lodging with a lingering death of cruelly long duration. Her vital powers gradually retired one by one. For many years she was unable to move a limb; latterly could scarcely speak audibly, or take barely sufficient food to keep life in the half-dead body. But these dismal hymns were her receipt for occupation and cheerfulness. ‘When I cannot sleep,’ she would say, in a dialect of her own peculiar pattern, ‘I _mew_.’—There was poetry in the origin of these ‘_mewings_,’ though none in the dark and narrow stanzas themselves. From the above illustrations it may be gathered that much of the bye-way poetry with which we shall deal, has never been promoted to the honours and heartaches of paper and print—nor even taken the manuscript forms of ‘longs and shorts’ as decidedly as did the imaginative instincts of Black Phillis, or the long-tried patience of the sufferer in the —— Ward. We may—and shall—have to do with authorship in humble life,—but less, perchance, than those will expect, who have considered our subject merely from the outside of the bookseller’s window, or from the sum total of a rhymester’s subscription list—drawing thence the charming inference that A., B. or C. is a poet, because he has found a publisher and extorted a public!—Too seldom has a Capel Lofft, or a Southey, or a More, while trying to bring forward a Bloomfield, or a Mary Colling, or an ungrateful Bristol Milkwoman, whose facility in versifying has arrested them,—considered how wide is the distance betwixt what may be called the unconscious Poetry of the People—and that meagre and second-hand manufacture, produced with a desire for fame, or under hopes of gain, which challenges competition with the efforts of men more favourably circumstanced, and which goes forth as virtually a solicitation for alms.—On the one side (to take the first instance which occurs) we shall find something like the Gondolier songs of Venice, patched up—St. Mark and the Moon know how!—out of bits of plays and bits of verses and bits of opera-tunes, by old men and girls and boys, while a sprightly people ply their picturesque trade under an Italian sky, with every image round them to inspire and encourage a sense of tune,—and which, after a while, get so rubbed into shape—so rounded and changed,—so decked with canal-wit,—so filled with local names and local words,—that a College of Anatomists should be puzzled to ‘resolve them into their primary elements.’—On the other side, we may cite as example any of the myriad verses anxiously strung together by the hectic and