OLD-WORLD LORE. 
233 
spirit finds vent, not only in the charming poem, too long to quote, called “ One 
Shilling Each,” and beginning : 
“ How shall a man or woman pass unstirred ? 
A shilling these ! One shilling, cage and bird ! ” 
and going on to narrate his delight at purchasing and setting free, “redstart, 
yellowhammer, finch ; ” but in such verses as these — a little marred though they 
be by the last line : 
“GOING SOUTH. 
“ It is ever so far away 
For the swallow to fly ; 
And she peeped for an English thatch 
At a round of sky ! 
“ But the elders have told her tales 
Of the sister blues ; 
And she starts at the wink of dawn 
On her windy cruise. 
“ She can tell her path in the void, 
Though her native sod 
Was here in a Warwickshire lane. 
For her pilot’s God.” 
It is only verses which appeal to Selbornians that we notice in these pages, 
and this excuses us for saying much about Mr. Doveton’s Songs. There is very 
little nature in them, and scarcely more art, although we find that fatal fluency 
which fills “the fourpenny box” with an unfailing flood of commonplace verse. 
The influence of Tennyson is manifest throughout, except of course in the “ gay ” 
songs, which we are glad not to be obliged to notice. We cannot think “ the 
river’s rim” a usual habitat of the daffodil (p. 125) ; the “ imperial iris flaunting 
its flag of gold ” does not “ guard the brook ” in April (p. 88) ; and the “ maiden 
cloaked and furred,” who told Mr. Doveton that she was going “ for holly green 
and mistletoe to deck the kirk at morn” (p. 64), must have been playing on his 
credulity. 
OLD-WORLD LORE. 
The approaching close of another year brings with it to most, if not all of us, 
a consciousness that “ we have left undone the things that we ought to have done,” 
and that we fully intended to do. The editor of Nature Notes is no exception 
to this rule ; rather, he is a sad example of the evils of procrastination. Month 
by month he has apologised for the omission of articles, notes, reviews and the 
like ; month by month has brought him more material of every kind, thus en- 
suring an accumulation of arrears ; and now at the end of the year he finds a 
sheaf of interesting communications still unpublished, a pile of interesting books 
unnoticed. 
The publishers have fortunately yielded to our plea for an extra four pages as 
a kind of Christmas-box to the readers of Nature Notes, and we propose to 
devote this for the most part to a notice of the volumes— some of them too long 
neglected — which we have received. Over many we should like to linger ; indeed, 
the desire to notice them at length has been the cause of the delay in noticing 
them at all. But at a season of book-giving, even a small indication where to 
choose is useful, and this we can at any rate supply. 
Those to whom the study of old customs and associations is a matter of interest 
— and their number is large — will find a storehouse of such lore in English Folk- 
Rhymes, compiled by Mr. G. F. Northall, and published by Messrs. Kegan, Paul 
& Co. (los. 6d.) This handsome volume, which has been in preparation for many 
years, is a classified collection of rhymes relating to places, persons and things ; to 
