Page:Doom of the Great City - Hay - 1880.djvu/56

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“Herod out-Heroded—alliteration carried to the verge of affectation—cannot destroy the subtle charm of, a volume full of musical verse, various in kind and in manner, but all, or nearly all, singularly melodious, quaint, refined, attractive. ‘Salvestra’ involves a description of matters which may shock very delicate nerves; but the poetical treatment shows that the writer has all that is required of delicacy as well as of passion, of tenderness, of imagination, and of language for turning the subject to most charming account.”—The Illustrated London News.

“We have already on several occasions expressed our great admiration of the merits of Mr. John Payne, and our conviction that he is entitled to a high place among the poets of the day. His astonishing mastery over difficulties of metre, the grace and harmony of his language, and the subtle charm which runs through all his writings, merit a warm recognition at the hands of all students of modern poetry. is manner is simply perfect; and if his matter is sometimes deficient in solidity, and sometimes open to a graver charge, which he shares with the fleshy school of poetry, we find it difficult to escape from the influence of the charm of his diction and of his wonderful lyrical power. The volume of which he has just published will well maintain his fame as one of the most refined and cultivated of the band of writers who have in the present day shown how flexible and melodious an instrument is to be found for the poet’s use in our English tongue. He revels in difficulties, and overcomes them with a grace and harmony of style which are most attractive.”—John Bull.

“We are indebted to Mr. Day for a most readable and entertaining collection of sketches of Transatlantic life, drawn by one who is not only a keen observer of men and manners, but who is also evidently gifted with a shrewd and penetrating insight into human nature. Our author, starting from Queenstown in one of the magnificent ‘National’ steamers, is landed within ten days at New York. The impression made upon him by the ‘Empire City’ does not appear to have been a favourable one. It must be remembered that the ‘Manhattanese’ are a very composite and cosmopolitan population, entirely engaged in commercial pursuits, from whom it would not be fair to expect the culture and refinement observable in such centres of political and literary activity as either Washington or Boston. Liverpool is not a fair sample of English life and manners; no more is New York of American. Mr. Day, who gives us a very full and exhaustive account of all the social surroundings of the ‘Empire City,’ with its huge Babel-like hotels, its swarm of restaurants and eating-houses, necessary to a people who live out of their own homes, and its varied modes of locomotion, likens this huge hive to ‘a combination of London, Berlin, and Paris.’ The city is laid out in parallelograms, and the streets are numerically named. The practice—widely prevalent—of hanging out clothes to dry on the house-tops must be sadly detrimental to the appearance of respectable neighbourhoods. Our author found that the city, generally speaking, is ill kept and worse governed. Still immense improvements have been made during the last thirty years in the police administration. We have been assured by a friend whose recollections of the city extend back to a period when the present generation were yet in the cradle, that in those days the ‘rowdies,’ as the promiscuous and rampant rascaldom of New York was termed, compelled respectable and peaceable citizens to take a revolver with them when they left