as you find in Rossetti and in Swinburne, are quite foreign to the spirit and simplicity of the old burthens, and must be regarded as of purely modern construction.

I need not go to any greater length on the subject of the refrain. The next thing to observe is that the bulk of English ballads are verses of eight syllables, this being euphonically the most natural form of English construction. Now, as regards the value of these compositions to you, a few words will be necessary. Although ballad-literature contains many beauties of an astonishing kind, you would make a great mistake in supposing that the general average of the compositions is high. Quite the contrary is the case. Our great collections of ballads, notably that of Professor Child, contain a very large amount of insignificant or vulgar material, quite useless to the man of letters. Nevertheless the man of letters must read them. The precious part of such literature exists only as gold exists in the natural state, mixed with various forms of sand or of hard rock. Sometimes we find an absolutely perfect ballad, just as a gold miner sometimes finds a lump or nugget of pure gold. But this is rare. The study of ballads requires great patience; and in your case especially so, because most of them, and nearly all the best, are in dialect, and can not be properly studied without the help of a glossary. Furthermore, the worth of such study must depend entirely upon your individual capacity for poetical feeling; this is of nature, and if you have it not, it is of no use to occupy yourselves with the study at all. But, if on reading a few of the best of such compositions, you feel your heart moved by them, I should then by all means advise you to follow up the study; for it would certainly have a considerable effect upon your literary studies and tastes in other directions. Again, those of you who know French and German would do well to pay a corresponding attention to the French and German ballads, especially the German.

The influence of the ballads in modern poetry was per

haps more marked in Germany than in England, and the first publication of the English ballads by Bishop Percy had an immense effect upon German poetry. In the time of Percy, Dr. Johnson strongly attacked the new taste, from the classical point of view, but in spite of his opposition, the imitation of the ballad began even in his own time. Goldsmith, for example, with his ballad of "Edwin and Angelina," shows the influence; but the poem itself also shows how little Goldsmith really understood how much the ballad form depends for success upon its simplicity. Such lines as

10

ог

To where yon taper cheers the vale
With hospitable ray,—

Where wilds, immeasurably spread,
Seem lengthening as I go,—

are in the pedantic taste of the time. No old ballad writer would have used such big words as "hospitable,” “immeasurably," or even "lengthening." The old singers used words of two syllables only when they could not find a word of one to express their meaning. So Goldsmith's poem, although a ballad, is by no means a successful imitation. Burns was a song writer rather than a balladist; and before Sir Walter Scott we have scarcely any noteworthy imitations of the old ballad, except the magnificent composition of Hamilton of Bangour, "The Braes of Yarrow," beginning

Busk ye, busk ye, my merry, merry bride.

The only criticism to be made of Hamilton's composition is that its rhyme and melody are too astonishingly perfect. We have no ancient ballad of so complicated a form. Coleridge's "Love" is open to the same objection as Goldsmith's composition, though in a lesser degree. It is ob

sole himself, until Charles the Second came to restore him to his parsonage. After that came the days of the Restoration, the days of wicked drama and wicked morals, the days when England was suffering from something much worse than civil war-something that might be described as a moral earthquake. Milton argued and wrote and died; a new materialistic philosophy appeared; everything changed, and seemed in danger of changing for the worse. But Herrick never troubled himself in the least about all these things. He continued in his solitude to write little verses about bees and butterflies and honey and kisses of girls and the gods of Greece and Rome and the customs of Christmas and of May-day. So he lived and died, entirely apart from his own time. And perhaps this is why we like him so much. In an age of corrupt hearts, he kept the joyousness and simplicity of a child-sometimes of a naughty child, but never of a very bad child. He kept close to nature in his best moods, when the fashionable world had already begun to desert nature, and to prepare the way for the artificial falsity of the eighteenth century. And I think that it is for this reason also that Herrick remains the only Caroline poet worthy of close study by Japanese students. Of course there are other great poets of the time-such as Donne and Crashaw and Carew-men who lived when Herrick lived, and who followed to some extent Elizabethan traditions. They are great in a certain way; but they are much less important for your particular studies. The English language has changed very much since those times, and therefore very few writers of the latter part of the sixteenth or the early part of the seventeenth century can be recommended to you. But in Herrick's particular case, the language has changed but little. His simplicity of heart kept his style so pure and his language so vital that you can read him to-day with advantage to your knowledge of English. I could not say this even about the great poet Milton. A careful study of Milton would be likely to do you more

harm than good. A careful study of Herrick could only do you good-and that in the best of all directions, in the study of daintiness of feeling united with perfect simplicity and clearness of expression.

CHAPTER VIII

BERKELEY

SOME knowledge, however slight, of the great eighteenth century thinker, George Berkeley, ought to be of some use to the student of English literature, who is obliged to be also a student of English thought. He belongs, both by his literary qualities and his philosophical powers, to the very first place among the men of his age; and this would be - a sufficient reason to make him the subject of a separate lecture. Besides, at this time, when the charge of materialism is being foolishly made by many thoughtless people against the rising generation of Japan, and the tendency of our time is said to be towards the destruction of all religion, it is especially important that every student should know the relation between Berkeley and the great oriental philosophers whom Berkeley never read. Exactly the same charges were brought against the views of this great man that have since been brought against other thinkers too profound for the ignorant to understand. Every one who does not express his assent to commonplace ideas about the nature of man and of the universe, is likely to be thought either irreligious or heretical. Berkeley had to meet this kind of opposition, and he met it after a fashion that still commands the respect of thinkers, but necessarily calls. forth the ridicule of ignorant people. Even Byron, liberal as he was in other matters, proved too shallow to appreciate the greatness of Berkeley, as he showed by the jesting lines

When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,

It was no matter what he said.

But on the contrary, what Berkeley said proved to be of the very greatest importance to western thought; and he must