TRIVIA.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20174, 28 February 1931, Page 13

TRIVIA.

Years ago I discovered in the "New Statesman" Mr James Bridie's clergyman, the Reverend Mr Choyco. I kept him by me a good wMIo, with great pleasure in his company, and at last took him to a lecture, hoping that he would please others as well. When I looked for him a few days later, he was not to; be found. It seemed that he must have slipped to the floor of the lecture-room, unnoticed, and there perished of boots and the caretaker's broom and the dustbin. I was sorry for this loss and have often since blamed my carelessness, until a fortnight ago, when suddenly I sighed for joy and blessed my -wise care, though forgotten; for in turning over some books to sea what was'scribbled in them or laid up in them, I camo upon the clergyman safely stowed between the leaves of Siegfried Sassoon's "Selected Poems." This is he:

"O might I, do you think, have a little more milki" His Emilcs wore as dolicate as filaments ol silk, _ And the gentle ladies; round him could ao | nothing but Stare _ At the smooth benediction of his hair; i At the tender aEceticiism informing his nose, I The authority, respect, and- affection of biß pose, ■ And quiver at the chest notes of that bland I golden voice, The voice of tho Reverend Mr Choyce. I He know tho cunning trot of the Bpoiler of the vines, He knew u good cigar, and he knew the names of -wines, , And the art of unpurtaining a gentlo lady a eyes, And filling them with rays of Paradise. But T thought of old KNOX reading bloodboltered Psalms . , To the ruffled Court gentlemen with swords and itching palms . , And the ladies of the Court with their seedpearls and laces, And pretty little hard enamelled faces. I havb nevor seen James Bridie's signature to anything else. Ho may bo a one-poem man, like Tynniclius the Chalcidian, wl>o is to bo read about in the dialogue botween Socrates and lon. Tho ''worst of poets," according to Socrates, Tynnichus wrote ."the best of songs," a paean which was in "everyone's mouth.'" Unfortunately the paean has been mislaid for mttch ; longer than the Eevorond Mr Choyco, and thero can now be little hope of its turning up. Tynnichus himself, however, is an immortal, who takes on many names and forms. There was Dean Burgon, for instance, who won the Newdigato Prize with "Petra," a poom which for an instant raises itself abovo tolcrability, above even the beauty of its best passage, and comes to perfection in tho line 1 , A rose-red city, halt as .old as Time. The Kcv. Charlos Wolfe was another Tynnichus, when ho wroto "Tho Burial of Sir John Moore." As it oirculatod from nowspapor to newspaper, it was ascribed to ono author after another, but soon forgotten Thon in 1824 Modwin published his "Conversations of Lord Byron," in which he records a discussion, among Byron, Shelley, himself, and others, of the relative merits of modern odes. Byron produced from a magazine "an ode you have never seen, that I consider littlo inferior to the best which the present proliile age has brought forth" and recited Wolfe's stanzas. He repeated the third and called it perfect: in particular tne j lines, But he lay like a warrior taking his rest i With his martial cloak around him. ( - Kobody fcnow the author! Shelley'i guessed Campbell, Medwin suspected! Byron hihiself; but when the "Conversa- I tions" revived interest in the poem and in the question of its authorship, \Volfe's was easily and dearly proved the hand- '

If Jano .Elliot wrote other poems than the "Lament far Flodden," they are unknown. She and • her brother talked of Flodden, as they drovo home one evening. He bet her a pair ,of gloves or "a set of ribbons" that she eofild not write a ballad on the battle; but before they were home she had it roughly shaped, and shaped towards the ultimato sad beauty of * i ' We'll hear nae jn*ir lilting at the »w»milking; , Women and bairns are fiesrtless ana wae; Sighing and moaning on nka green loaning— The Flowers pjt the Forest are a' wedo away. * "William Sharp thought that Blanco "White's. sonnet to Night was' either "a magnjficient fluke," or olho the outcome of "a not very powerful poetic impulse, concentrated in one great effort, and therein exhausting itself for ever." It is not much of an 'explanation which uses the mystery ot the "one great effort" and the total poetic sllpnce following, to explain tha mvptery. Better, indeed, to go bacjt to Tynnicim?, whose paean "was without art, being, as he himself says, the invention of the mpses," and to the Platonic ddctrine that Socrates utters: 'fJPoy tlfis way the God seems to me to indicate, and not allow qis to doubt,' that these beautiful poems are not human, pr, the work of man, but divine and tho. word of the Gods." I fancy that modem psychology u getting back to something like the fine, old-fasliioned theory of possession.

- -With Mr Bridie, a. one-poem man to me, I may namo a few others. I never heard of* anything that Ogdcn Nash -wrote, except rhilo Vance • Needs a kick in the pance. It rhymes, it is true, it satisfies Coleridge's definition of poetry as "the best words; in the best order. " Why are such things hid? . Stoddard King sounds faintly {familiar, and'brings 1 with it a scent of honeysuckle, which I trace to Woodbine Willip, who was tho Bev. Studdart Kennedy, who was therefore not the same man, after all. But Stoddard King is the writer of a sonnet ad' dressed, apparently, to expensive, bridge-playing tourists, and I know hi® only by its liiglily agreeahlq sestet: They will play bridge upon the seven mob, They .will ploy bridge at Naples X suppose. At Canterbury and- at _ I'd rather bo upon my hands atod Knee?, And, - with the ground adjacent to my nqBS, Patiently push a peanut up Pike .8 Peak.

"While of the philosophical poem on the jchneum'on I do not .know even the author's name. It js not a long work. tlie quite irrational ichneumon • is bucH a fool' it is almost human And' although internal evidence; clearly places the author of the following in tho United States and dates it after a notable modern, invention, it is. impossible to get any nearer to the fellfew, even by rejecting Emily Dickenson, Edna Millay, Hilda Conklin, E. A. Robinson, Theodore Dreiser, E. Frost, and others, with more pr less confidence. > THfJ MARTINI. Gin and Vermouth opr English cpusina think of And name this drink, and call for ."Gin and. It" Since French' Vermouth they do not like, a bit,— Bat they've m 1m to atk« » jn;w drink '