f occasional or society verse, "has
fully succeeded who did not possess a certain gift of irony." That is
profoundly true. A would-be writer of light verse who has not an
ironical habit of mind had better change his purpose and write an epic.
Locker has his full share of the necessary gift. Half gay, half
melancholy, always ironical--dissembling most of pain and some of
pleasure--he is in certain ways the appropriate spokesman of a society
like our own, which is really most natural when most dissembling, or
dismissing with a smile, its deeper emotions. There is nothing about
Locker which is not natural. As he is, so (apparently) does he speak:
far more candidly and with more of self-revelation than Praed, more
candidly than Mr Austin Dobson, who is apt to veil his personality behind
a mask of elegant antiquarianism. But Locker is more artless and naive
(which qualities are in him not the least inconsistent with irony) than
any modern writer, except, perhaps, R. L. Stevenson now and then; and
with the latter _naivete_ itself is sometimes an artifice. Mr Brander
Matthews rightly lays stress on this aspect of Locker's poetry;
"individuality and directness of expression"--that is the true note of
"London Lyrics." He is far more genuine and spontaneous than Praed. It
is difficult and perhaps invidious to compare the two as "humorists." It
may be that Locker's vein of humour is larger and truer than the earlier
poet's. Praed belongs, as has been said, to a period of other men and
other manners. Probably he is the wittier of the two; yet this might be
contradicted. Locker's humour has the reflective vein, with a suggestion
of pathos, of the great writers who flourished in the early and middle
Victorian era. We are perhaps a little out of tune now with the
sentiment of the middle of the nineteenth century and perhaps, too, with
Praed's "antithetical rhetoric"; but Locker's humour can never be quite
out of fashion. Readers will always smile (not laugh) at "The Housemaid"
or "The Pilgrims of Pall Mall" or the lines "To my Grandmother"--

"With her bridal-wreath, bouquet,
Lace farthingale, and gay
_Falbala_,--
If Romney's touch be true,
What a lucky dog were you,
Grandpapa!

. . . . .

What funny fancy slips
From atween these cherry lips?
Whisper me,
Fair Sorceress in paint,
What canon says I mayn't
Marry thee?"