he issue
of 1893, and some of these are much altered. It is hoped that readers of
Locker's later and more highly finished work will consider a
republication of his "Primitiae" justified by the interest which attaches
to all beginnings.

So many people even now confuse minor poetry with bad poetry that it is
almost invidious to call a poet minor. Yet there is no doubt that minor
poetry can be good in its way, just as major poetry can be good in _its_
way. "If he [Locker] was a minor poet he was at least [why 'at least'?]
a master of the instrument he touched, which cannot," writes Mr Coulson
Kernahan in the _Nineteenth Century_ for October 1895, "be said of all
who would be accounted _major_." Locker was not of those, in his own
opinion, who would be accounted major. "My aim," he says, "was humble.
I used the ordinary metres and rhymes, the simplest language and ideas, I
hope, flavoured with an individuality. I strove . . . not to be flat,
and above all, not to be tedious." It is not necessary to prove by
argument and illustration that Locker is a minor poet, nor that he
belongs to that honourable company of writers of what we now call "light
verse"--the masters of which are, after all, among the immortals--Horace
and Herrick. His place in that company is not so easy to define.
Probably he stands half way between the serious singers--who succeed by
virtue of grace and artistic finish, yet lack the touch of passion, the
indefinable something that makes greatness--and the bards whose primary
object, like Calverley's, is to make the reader laugh. "He elected,"
says Mr Coulson Kernahan, "to don the cap and bells when he might have
worn the singing robes of the poet": a description of one who chose to be
a jester when he might have been serious, and hardly applicable to
Locker, who is never a professed "funny man." Mr Kernahan is far more
just when he claims for "London Lyrics" a kind of sober gentleness which
moves neither to laugh nor to weep: "his sad scenes may touch us to
tender melancholy, but never to tears; his gay ones to smile, but seldom
to laughter." Locker's Muse is not the Muse of high spirits. He does
not start with the intention of jesting. He is the gentle and serious
spectator of things which are not the most serious in life--with a sense
of the humorous which is not repressible, and which enters into all his
reflections, but which he never allows wholly to master him.

It is really impossible