ester. He had been for some years upon the books
of St John's College, Cambridge, and took the degree of B.D. in 1850. He
resigned Whitcombe in 1852, finding the work too hard in connexion with his
mastership; and in June of that year he sustained a severe bereavement by
the death of his wife. Continuing his studies in the science of language,
he published his _Philological Grammar_ in 1854, drawing examples from more
than sixty languages. For the copyright of this erudite work he received
L5. The second series of dialect poems, _Hwomely Rhymes_, appeared in 1859
(2nd ed. 1863). _Hwomely Rhymes_ contained some of his best-known pieces,
and in the year of its publication he first began to give readings from his
works. As their reputation grew he travelled all over the country,
delighting large audiences with his quaint humour and natural pathos. In
1861 he was awarded a civil list pension of L70 a year, and in the next
year published _Tiw_, the most striking of his philological studies, in
which the Teutonic roots in the English language are discussed. Barnes had
a horror of Latin forms in English, and would have substituted English
compounds for many Latin forms in common use. In 1862 he broke up his
school, and [v.03 p.0414] removed to the rectory of Winterborne Came, to
which he was presented by his old friend, Captain Seymour Dawson Damer.
Here he worked continuously at verse and prose, contributing largely to the
magazines. A new series of _Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect_
appeared in 1862, and he was persuaded in 1868 to publish a series of
_Poems of Rural Life in Common English_, which was less successful than his
dialect poems. These latter were collected into a single volume in 1879,
and on the 7th of October 1886 Barnes died at Winterborne Came. His poetry
is essentially English in character; no other writer has given quite so
simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour of rural
England. His work is full of humour and the clean, manly joy of life; and
its rusticity is singularly allied to a literary sense and to high
technical finish. He is indeed the Victorian Theocritus; and, as English
country life is slowly swept away before the advance of the railway and the
telegraph, he will be more and more read for his warm-hearted and fragrant
record of rustic love and piety. His original and suggestive books on the
English language, which are valuable in spite of their eccentricities,
include:--