enable them to serve the purpose of any gathering where the first idea
is that there should be a cheerful noise. Complete success in this
kind only required Mr Kipling to fill in the skeleton of a metre which
brings the right words at the right moment to the tip of the galloping
tongue, and this he has admirably done.

Where in _Barrack Room Ballads_ Mr Kipling has attempted to do more
than fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeeds
in defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose. We
have seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasis
of the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitive
imagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier's point of
view. In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional. In
_Barrack Room Ballads_ it is more pronounced.

We may take three stanzas of _Snarleyow_ as evidence that Mr Kipling's
_Barrack Room Ballads_, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater mass
of his verse, _really had to be metrical_; also as evidence that, in so
far as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect they
are less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney. The
Battery was charging into action and the Driver had just been saying
that a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field:

"'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' shell
A little right the battery an' between the sections fell;
An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels,
There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.

"Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain,
'For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain.'