London Lyrics

London Lyrics is the book of Poetry. The first edition of the London Lyrics of Frederick Locker Lampson, better known as Frederick Locker, appeared in 1857; — the latest, in 1893. In this solitary collection, modified or expanded as fresh impressions were called for, is comprised all the author's work in rhyme which he thought worthy of preservation. His earliest illustrators were George Cruikshank and Richard Doyle ; his last, KLate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott — names which in themselves seem to mark the extremes of the period during which the book was in progress. Between the high spirits of the elder artists, and the gentler humour of Miss Greenaway and Caldecott, there is an appreciable difference, — a difference which has its practical analogue in the verses they pictorially interpreted. For it is certain that when Mr. Locker set out in the fifties, his standard was not the standard at which he was aiming in the eighties. The times had changed, and he had changed with them. At the beginning Praed was his admitted model ; he also admired Hood and "Thomas Ingoldsby. " He essayed to reproduce the antithetical trick of the first, the perfected pun of the second, the dexterous word -chiming of the third. His primary ambition, we may surmise, was no more than to write humorous verse of the better kind, adding to it the impress of his own personality; his next, to give greater finish, and a less trivial motive, to that class of metrical effort which has been unscientifically called vers de sociiti his eventual and ultimate endeavour, to produce something which, preserving its atmosphere of origin, should be neither one nor the other, but might fairly be described as poetry — not, perhaps, as poetry of the "big bow-wow kind" (in Walter Scott's phrase), but yet essentially poetry, in virtue of its theme, its level of technique, and its elevation of tone.