er city has lagged behing Bradford in the production of dialect
literature, the Yorkshire Songs of J. H. Eccles, published in 1862, is a
notable contribution to the movement whose history is here being
recorded. In John Hartley, Halifax possessed the most versatile
dialect-writer that Yorkshire has so far produced. For fifty years this
writer, who died in 1915, poured forth lyric song and prose tale in
unstinted measure. Most of his dialect work found a place in the
Original Illuminated Clock Almanac, which he edited from 1867 until his
death; but from time to time he gathered the best of his work into book
form, and his Yorkshire Lyrics, published in 1898, occupy a place of
honour in many a Yorkshire home. The examples from his works here given
will serve to illustrate his fine ear for metrical harmony, his
imaginative power, and his sympathetic interpretation of Yorkshire
character. Of the younger generation of Yorkshire poets, most of them
still alive, I must speak more briefly. But it must not be overlooked
that, so far from there being any falling off in the volume or quality of
dialect-verse, it is safe to say that it has never been in so flourishing
a condition as at the present day. Dialect poems are now being written
in all parts of the county. Editors of weekly papers welcome them gladly
in their columns; the Yorkshire Dialect Society has recently opened the
pages of its annual Transactions to original contributions in verse and
prose, and every year the printing presses of London and Yorkshire
publish volumes of dialect verse. Of individual writers, whose work
finds illustration in this anthology, mention may be made of the Rev. W.
H. Oxley, whose T' Fisher Folk o' Riley Brig (1888) marks, I believe, the
first attempt to interpret in verse the hazardous life of the east-coast
fisherman. Farther north, Mr. G. H. Cowling has given us in his A
Yorkshire Tyke (1914) a number of spirited and winsome studies of the
life and thought of the Hackness peasant. The wold country of the East
Riding has found its interpreter in Mr. J. A. Carill, whose Woz'ls
(1913) is full of delightful humour, as readers of "Love and Pie" will
readily discover for themselves. "The File-cutter's L'ament " (see
below), which I have selected from Mr. Downing's volume, Smook thru' a
Shevvield Chimla, will show that the Sheffield "blade" is doing his best
to carry on the tradition set by Abel Bywater eighty years ago. Airedale
still