This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ...represented the popular feeling of their own day. Their songs and ballads will be the study of some future Macaulay, and are of the kind that both makes and illustrates national history. Their object was not art; some of their rhymes are poor indeed; but they fairly belong to that class of which Fletcher of Saltoun ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ...represented the popular feeling of their own day. Their songs and ballads will be the study of some future Macaulay, and are of the kind that both makes and illustrates national history. Their object was not art; some of their rhymes are poor indeed; but they fairly belong to that class of which Fletcher of Saltoun wrote: "If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation." Here, too, we may say a word of a contemporary tribe of English democratic poets, many of them springing from the people, who kept up such an alaCHARTIST VERSE. 261 rum during the Chartist agitation. After Thorn, the "Inverury poet," who mostly confined himself to dialect and genre verses, and young Nicoll, who, at the beginning of our period strayed from Scotland down to Leeds, and poured out stirring liberal lyrics during the few months left to him, --after these we come to the bards of Chartism itself. This movement lasted from 1836 to 1850, and had a distinct school of its own. There was Cooper, known as "the Chartist poet." Linton, afterward to become so eminent as an artist and engraver, was equally prolific and more poetical, --a born reformer, who relieved his eager spirit by incessant poetizing over the pseudonym of "Spartacus," and of whom I shall have occasion to speak again. Ebenezer Jones was another Chartist rhymester, but also composed erotic verse; a man of considerable talent, who died young. These men and their associates were greatly in earnest as agitators, and often to the injury of their position as artists and poets. Chartism. Thomai Cooper: 1805 "Spartacus" Ebeneser 7ones: 1820-60. CHAPTER VIII. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. FEW of the minor poets belonging to the middle ...
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