REVIEW.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 800, 15 January 1877, Page 3

REVIEW.

Tub latest performance of this voluminous author is perhaps a little allegorical. That there is a deep and serious hidden meaning underlying the narrative, a moral in short sufficiently clear to the moral philosopher, but ao buried as to escape the sight of the careless general reader cannot be doubted for a moment. Those far-fetched, yet striking expressions which, for want of a better name we must call Willmerisms —all who have read the “Lowing Herd” for example, and remember the pathetic and affectionate description of the author’s rifle, as his “ night companion wrapped in rags and oil,” or the “Live, slippery eel?” with which in a later work he addresses the long departed year 1856, will at once understand what we mean by a Willmerism —are, if less numerous than of old, still to the fore, whilst our author’s Herculean powers of ringing the changes in rhyme, not only show no abatement but have positively increased with time.

He inks and pinks, rinks and sinks, blinks and winks, shrinks and drinks, thinks and stinks (in rhyme that is), in a way that has never been approached since the biographer of the Jackdaw of llheims was laid to his rest under the pleasant Kentish elms. Can the soul of him, whose last jingle was of thynkinge-ynkinge-ynkinge, have entered into the body of him who still writes linking, sinking, winking ? But the pleasant fancy of transmigration would lead us too far from our subject.

We regret to have space only for two or three short extracts from this grand poem.

4 ‘ Man runs his race so fleet to meet; With wisdom then how shy ! E’en with the ‘ Loafer in the Street,’ He turns his face awry.” Alas ! poor Loafer, even from you does shy wisdom sometimes turn awry. But, cheer up, you only nod with Homer ; you wake to find yourself and Willmer surrounded by a common halo. Here is a stanza we scarcely understand ;

■“ But if to rink wo only think, Of pleasures night and morning ; Morality will win and wink. And laugh us all to scorn.” Just as old Hardcastle says in the play, “This may be modern modesty, but by the hand of my body it sounds very like oldfashioned impudence,” so are we reluctantly constrained to observe that our author’s morality mu«Ji resembles our own immorality. If there is a couplet which we would advise the author to expunge in future editions, it is this—- “ He cared not for modes in winking: Virtue crowned his world-wide thinking.” There is a suspicion of levity in coupling the modes of winking with virtue, and a world-wide thinker should bo above the suspicion. Wo conclude our extracts with the most touching picture of domestic felicity which we have read for many years, one which wc can confidently leave to speak for itself.

“ ill uk ye fathers ; think of mothers ; Entwine as ivy trees ; Thinking sisters, rinkiug brothers, Strive mutually to plsase.” We now venture with some diffidence to make a suggestion to the Laureate of Canterbury. W e gather from various allusions such as that in the work under notice to his powers of running fifty 5 ears ago, that our author, though still bold and vigorous, is no longer in the first bloom of youth. His various productions have been issued in a fugitive form, and though doubtless carefully preserved by his admirers, the earlier ones are little known to the present generatior " Let him collect, revise, and re-issue a complete edition of his wo-ks, and appeal from the “ audience fit though few” which surrounds him in his own day to that numerous posterity which will people Zeahmdia in the time to come.

'* “All the World's a Link.” By G. Willmer, author of “The Lowing Herd,” “Zealandia’s Hope,” (fee.