Perhaps the dulness of our age shows itself most clearly in its humour; the professional jester of the dinner-table or comic journal is of all men the most saddening. It is related that when Emerson took his little boy to see a circus clown, the child looked up with troubled eyes and said: “Papa, the funny man makes me want to go home.” Many of us must have felt that sensation when we have heard or read some of the banalities that pass for humorous. It is here that “G.B.S.” stands out in refreshing contrast; his wit is as genuine and spontaneous as that of Sydney Smith; but whereas Sydney Smith was constrained in his old age to calculate how many cartloads of flesh-meat he consumed in his lifetime, Bernard Shaw has been able to tell the world that his funeral will be followed “not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live fish”--representatives of grateful fellow-beings whom he has _not_ eaten.[19] If socialists had cared for the poetical literature of their cause one half so well as the Chartists did, the names of Francis Adams and John Barlas would have been far more widely known. It was Mr. W. M. Rossetti who drew my attention to Adams’s fiery volume of verse, the _Songs of the Army of the Night_, first published in Australia in 1887; and as I was then preparing an anthology of _Songs of Freedom_ I got into communication with the writer, and our acquaintance quickly ripened into friendship. Francis Adams was a poet of Socialism in a much truer sense than William Morris; for, while Morris was a poet who became a socialist, Adams, like Barlas, was less a convert to Socialism than a scion of Socialism, a veritable _Child of the Age_, to quote the title of his own autobiographical romance, in the storm and stress of his career. He had received a classical education at Shrewsbury School (the “Glastonbury” of his novel), and after a brief spell of schoolmastering, had became a journalist and wanderer. He was connected for a short time, in 1883 or thereabouts, with the Social Democratic Federation, and enrolled himself a member under the Regent’s Park trees one Sunday afternoon at a meeting addressed by his friend, Frank Harris. In Australia, for a time, where he took an active part in the Labour movement, and wrote frequently for the _Sydney Bulletin_ and other journals, he had many friends and admirers; but just as a Parliamentary career was opening for him he was crippled by illness, and returned to England, a consumptive, in 1890, to die three years later by his own hand.