In fiction the limits of dialect that is not dialect are plainly defined, not by usage of the masters, for none than masters go more often wrong—as none but they can afford to do—but by reason and the sense of things. If in evolution of his plot the story teller find it expedient to seek assistance from the “man o’ the people” as a subordinate character, that worthy person must needs use the speech of his tribe; as actors, having to wear something—a regrettable necessity—may garb themselves in the costume of the time of the play, however hideous it may be. But beyond this the teller of stories that are not true is denied the right to go. To take for hero or heroine a person unable to speak the language of the tale, whose conversations are turbid swirls in the clear stream of the narrative, is an affront justifiable only by a moral purpose presumably in equal need of justification. II One reads Mr. Hay’s earlier poems with a thrill of pride. They open glimpses of unselfish courage and sublime devotion compared with which the prancing pageantry of Homer afflicts us like the cheap tinsel of the melodrama. Such is the serious judgment of a reputable writer living in the capital of the nation. It has a particular reference to “Little Breeches” and “Jim Bludso,” which are not poems at all, but formless blobs of coarse, rank sentimentality in the speech of snuff-rubbers and clay-eaters—the so-called “dialect.” They are no better and could not be worse than the “Hoosier” horrors of Riley and the “barrack-room” afflictions of Kipling. I do not doubt that Hay’s dislike of them and his wish that they might be forgotten incited him to literary silence, whereby we are deprived of the poetry that he might have given us had he remained in the field. There is not a true poet in this country who has not experienced the deep disgust of observing the superior “popularity” of his own worst work. That here and there a few should give up in despair, taking to politics, to business, to any coarse pursuit “understanded of the people,” is natural and not to be condemned. These accept their dreadful fame as a punishment fitting the crime, and promise atonement by resolving to write no more “dialect poetry” while stealing is more honorable and indigence more interesting.