avore Their doors, vor to chatty an' zee volk goo by.

For daughters ha' mornen when mothers ha' night, An' there's beauty
alive when the fairest is dead; As when one sparklen wave do zink down
from the light, Another do come up an' catch it instead.

Rightly did the Edinburgh reviewer of the 'thirties, in noticing Barnes's
poems--the very edition from which I was reading, perfect, by the way,
in its ribbed paper and clear print--declare "there has been no such art
since Horace." And here I may interpolate that the reviewer in question
was Mr. George Venables, who was within a year to become a friend of
mine. He and his family were close friends of my wife's people, and when
after my marriage I met him, a common love of Barnes brought together
the ardent worshipper of the new schools of poetry, for such I was, and
the old and distinguished lawyer who was Thackeray's contemporary at the
Charterhouse. Barnes was for us both a sign of literary freemasonry
which at once made us recognise each other as fellow-craftsmen.

Bewildered readers will ask how my discovery of Barnes affected my
position at _The Spectator_. It happened in this way. A couple of
weeks after I had been established at _The Spectator_ as a
"_verus socius_" Barnes died, at a very great age. It was one of
those cases in which death suddenly makes a man visible to the
generation into which he has survived. Barnes had outlived not only his
contemporaries but his renown, and most of the journalists detailed to
write his obituary notice had evidently found it a hard task to say why
he should be held in remembrance.

But by a pure accident here was I, in the high tide of my enthusiasm for
my new poet. Needless to say I was only too glad to have a chance to let