R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Andrew Lang in the 'Seventies 85anybody takes this word to be a synonym for ' humorous'we begin to see a great light—for humorous 'in a quietway' (as a good-for-nothing satirist-contemporary ofthose days observed of something else) Lang always was,except perhaps sometimes, though rarely, when humourwas doubtfully in place. But 'waggish' he was never orvery seldom, on a few occasions when I think he did it onpurpose by way of throwing more contempt on hissubject. Yet the description is, as was said, valuable. Itexplains his immense popularity, especially in the numberof miscellaneous and non-political matters that he wroteabout for so many years in the Daily News, because it isquite possible that a certain proportion of the vulgus didtake this quiet humour for a variety of the drawn-outjoking they admire on the stage. And it is possible thatothers may have disliked and may now dislike it becausethey took it at the same ' angle of the moral oxygen' anddid not like that angle, not being able to see round it.It was not till just this side of the middle of the'seventies that I actually met Lang; for during theirearlier years I had been living first in Guernsey and thenin the north of Scotland. But I had, of course, seen a gooddeal of his work in different places, and it so happenedthat his first book, Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, dealtwith a subject which (partly I suppose owing to my residencein the Channel Islands with Hugo for neighbourthough not acquaintance) I had myself taken up someyears earlier. The title, however, which has just beengiven was not the whole one; for ' and other poems' wasadded, and these other poems supply a considerable partof the matter. To begin with a book of verse has alwaysbeen more or less the proper thing—in fact I believe it isnot improper even now. But it was not the proper thingas yet, though it came to be so before very long, to beginwith a book of prose compacted of short newspaper