of our own time. I greatly prefer Mr. Richard
Swiveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris. I prefer the man who exceeded in rosy
wine in order that the wing of friendship might never moult a feather
to the man who exceeds quite as much in whiskies and sodas, but declares
all the time that he's for number one, and that you don't catch him
paying for other men's drinks. The old men of pleasure (with their
tooral ooral) got at least some social and communal virtue out of
pleasure. The new men of pleasure (without the slightest vestige of
a tooral ooral) are simply hermits of irreligion instead of religion,
anchorites of atheism, and they might as well be drugging themselves
with hashish or opium in a wilderness.

But the chorus of the old songs had another use besides this obvious one
of asserting the popular element in the arts. The chorus of a song, even
of a comic song, has the same purpose as the chorus in a Greek tragedy.
It reconciles men to the gods. It connects this one particular tale with
the cosmos and the philosophy of common things, Thus we constantly find
in the old ballads, especially the pathetic ballads, some refrain about
the grass growing green, or the birds singing, or the woods being merry
in spring. These are windows opened in the house of tragedy; momentary
glimpses of larger and quieter scenes, of more ancient and enduring
landscapes. Many of the country songs describing crime and death have
refrains of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the whole
company were coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a view
of existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad called "The Berkshire
Tragedy," about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for the
consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (which
should come in a kind of burst) runs:

"And I'll be true to my love
If my love'll be true to me."

The very reasonable arrangement here suggested is introduced, I think,
as a kind of throw back to the normal, a reminder that even "The
Berkshire Tragedy" does not fill the whole of Berkshire. The poor
young lady is drowned, and the wicked miller (to whom we may have been
affectionately attached) is hanged; but still a ruby kindles in the
vine, and many a garden by the water blows. Not that Omar's type of
hedonistic resignation is at all the same as the breezy impatience of
the Berkshire refrain; but they are alike in so far as they gaze out
beyond the particular complicati