184 



Uoies 011 litifeptc §oolb, &t. 



" The Fifth Series of Wiltshire Rhymes and Tales in the Wiltshire 

 Dialect," by Edward Slow, Wilton, N.D. [1895], pp. 150. 



This volume, which is, we believe, the first book that has ever been 

 entirely printed, bound, and published at a Wilton press, contains a further 

 instalment of those humorous sketches in prose and verse which we have so 

 long been accustomed to associate with Mr. Slow's name. The dialect in 

 which they are written is mainly that of South Wilts, which is well adapted 

 to such work as this, though hardly so racy, perhaps, as the folk-speech of 

 the northern part of our county. Local festivities, teetotalism and politics, 

 the hunting-field and the bean-feast, the aged poor and the hard measure 

 dealt to them — all in turn furnish Mr. Slow with a theme. We have only 

 space here to mention two or three of them. Among the best of the 

 humorous pieces is Tha Parish Council Bill, an amusing dialogue, in which 

 one over-sanguine rustic reckons up what he expects to get out of the act 

 personally— a new cottage, cow-shed, spring-cart and pony, and a hundred 

 things besides, while his friend plaintively wonders where the money is to come 

 from for it all. There is a hunting song, Tha ivould Grovety Vox, which 

 has plenty of " go " about it and a swinging chorus, and a Haymeakin 

 Zong which reminds us not ungracefully of William Barnes. We are glad 

 to see that Mr. Slow has given us some short sketches in prose this time, 

 including Tha Caird Pearly and tha Chimley Sweep, which deals with 

 a certain well-known incident in " Passen Hootick's " life. 



The Recollections of the Very Rev. Gr. D. Boyle, Dean of Salisbury. 

 London: Edward Arnold, 37, Bedford Street, Strand, W.C. 1895. 8vo. 

 Cloth. 16s. pps. xiii. and 302, with frontispiece process portrait of the 

 author. 



Three things strike the reader with astonishment in the pages of this 

 interesting volume. First, the amazing number of notable men with whom 

 the author has been brought into more or less close contact in the course 

 of his life; secondly, the powers of memory which the Dean must be 

 possessed of to be able to set down, as he has done, the observations and 

 criticisms made by one after another of these men twenty, or thirty, or 

 forty years ago ; and thirdly, the remarkable fact that apparently not one 

 of this mixed multitude ever did or said anything that was in any way 

 unkind or disagreeable. As the son of the Lord Justice General of 

 Scotland the Dean in his boyhood saw and knew most of the lights of 

 literary society in Edinburgh — including Sir Walter Scott. Later on as 

 boy at Charterhouse he enjoyed unusual advantages again in becoming 

 acquainted with many of the well-known men of letters of that day in 

 London. At Oxford he numbered amongst his friends the men best worth 

 knowing in the university — and through all his after life as Vicar of St. 

 Michael's Handsworth, and of Kidderminster, and as Dean of Salisbury, 

 be seems never to have lost touch with the multitude of friends eminent in 



