we knew him--or her--as Augustus Snodgrass or Blanche Amory--an amiable
fool or an unamiable minx. The twentieth century has already, in its
short course, done much to remove this prejudice, and the minor poet is no
longer expected to be apologetic; his circle of readers, though small, is
sympathetic, and the outside public is learning to tolerate him and to
recognise that it is as natural and wholesome for him to write and publish
his verses as it is for the minor painter to depict and exhibit in public
his interpretation of the beauty and power which he sees in human life and
in nature. All this is clear gain, and the time may not be far distant
when England will again become what it was in Elizabethan days--a nest of
singing birds, where the minor poets will be able to take their share in
the chorus of song, leaving the chief parts in the oratorio to the
Shakespeares and Spensers of tomorrow.

The twenty-five poems of which this volume consists are meant to serve a
double purpose. Most of them are character-sketches or dramatic studies,
and my wish is to bring before the notice of my readers the habits of mind
of certain Yorkshire men and women whose acquaintance I have made. For
ten years I have gone up hill and down dale in the three Ridings, intent
on the study of the sounds, words and idioms of the local folk-speech. At
first my object was purely philological, but soon I came to realise that
men and women were more interesting than words and phrases, and my
attention was attracted from dialect speech to dialect speakers. Among
Yorkshire farmers, farm labourers, fishermen, miners and mill workers I
discovered a vitality and an outlook upon life of which I, a bourgeois
professor, had no previous knowledge. Not, only had I never met such men
before, but I had not read about them in literature, or seen their
portraits painted on canvas. The wish to give a literary interpretation
of the world into which I had been privileged to enter grew every day more
insistent, and this volume is the fulfilment of that wish.