Here the pictures are perfect; each is in its way a little Bewick. If there is once or twice a slight roughness in the metre, it is such as may be met with in Cowley; and if the introduction of ‘lares’ at an English hearth startles us a little, it is just such surprises as come upon us in Cowley and the poets of his time. The charm of the above song is greatly enhanced by the music. We have no such songs nor any such music for English people generally in these days. Music-hall ruffianism woos the public ear with beastly innuendo, worse than downright speaking, and the Hurlingham husseydoms, after assisting at the butchery of doves, talk music-hall slang and play Champagne Charley quadrilles. Let us now add a word respecting another child of song, born in Southampton, and still living when Charles Dibdin came there into the world--Isaac Watts. Isaac Watts and Charles Dibdin! Why not? They are not so far apart as you may think. Isaac, the Southampton Nonconformist schoolmaster’s son, lived from 1674, reign of Charles the Second, to 1748, reign of the second George. Charles Dibdin was, at the latter period, three years old. The piety of Watts is no more questionable than the loyalty of Dibdin. Watts upheld piety by simple means in an impious age. Dibdin sustained loyalty at a time when revolutionary ideas were struggling into activity at home, and when there were enemies abroad who found moral support in such a struggle. If Dibdin’s allegiance found occasionally exaggerated expression, so Watts’s piety sometimes found a rather arrogant utterance. Dibdin, however, was--strange as it may appear--more humble and contented than Watts. In a ballad in ‘The Old Woman of Eighty,’ Dibdin makes a crowd of poor unlearned country folk sing:-- Come here, ye rich; come here, ye great; Come here, ye grave: come here, ye gay; Behold our blest, though humble fate, Who, while the sun shines, make our hay. Therein is Christian philosophy with content. Watts makes his well-born Christian child an insufferable prig, who would have scorned Dibdin’s half-starved wretch; for example, in the ‘Praise for Mercies’:-- While some poor wretches scarce can tell Where they may lay their head, I have a home wherein to dwell And rest upon my bed. In Dibdin’s ‘True Courage’ Bob Bounce is ready to eat an enemy alive, but the minstrel humanises him, and inculcates the maxim that all men are brothers:-- That my friend Jack or Tom I should rescue from danger, Or lay my life down for each lad in the mess, Is nothing at all; ’tis the poor wounded stranger, And the poorer the more I shall succour distress. This may be rough morality, but it is of better quality than the following selfish sample in Watts: Lord, I ascribe it to thy grace, And not to chance, _as others do_, That I was born of Christian race, And not a heathen or a Jew.