s with the adventures which befall a certain
Johnny Simpson, who, when crossed in love, seeks the aid of the witches
to aid him in his work of vengeance on the woman who has cast him off.
The story is told with great vividness, and the author has made an
effective use of all the malevolent powers of witchcraft, seconded by the
elemental forces of thunder and lightning, to aid him in telling a story
of great dramatic power. Leet Livvy, on the other hand, is as sober and
restrained as one of the verse-tales of Crabbe, and the only resemblance
which it bears to Mr. Blakeborough's witch-story lies in the fact that
its hero, like Johnny Simpson, belongs to the peasantry and has suffered
at the hands of a woman. The tragic story of "Owd Mattha o' Marlby Moor"
is recorded by the sexton whose duty it is to toll the passing bell, and
Mr. Fletcher, whose reputation as a novelist is deservedly high, has
rendered the narrative with consummate art. The use of dialect enhances
the directness and dramatic realism of the story at every turn; the
characters stand out sharp and clear, and we are brought face to face
with the passion that makes for tragedy. The poem is purged clean of all
sentiment and moralising: it is narrative pure and simple, but aglow with
the lurid flame of a passion that burns to the very roots of life. It is
no exaggeration to say that Leet Livvy is the greatest achievement in
Yorkshire dialect poetry up to the present time; let us hope that it is
an earnest of even greater things yet to come.

The duty still remains of offering a few words of explanation concerning
the poems which find a place in the second part of this anthology, and
which I have classified as "traditional poems." It is not contended that
all of these are folk-poems in the strict sense of the term, but all of
them are of unknown authorship, and for most of them a considerable
antiquity may be claimed; moreover, like the folk-song, they owe their
preservation rather to oral tradition than to the labours of the scribe.
Many of these poems enshrine some of the customs and superstitions of the
country-side and carry our thoughts back to a time when the
Yorkshireman's habit of mind was far more primitive and childlike than it
is to-day. Moreover, though many of the old popular beliefs and rites
have vanished before the advance of education and industrialism, the
Yorkshireman still clings to the past with a tenacity which exceeds that
of the peop