same way wild Prince Hal is nearer to our hearts than that strutting rhetorician, Henry V. In our own times, Dickens, who knew popular tastes so well, created a whole range of characters each of whom has a like freedom from care. Even the immortal Pickwick is something of a vagabond, leaving aside Barnaby Rudge, the Jarleys, and all his delightful roving coachmen and strolling players. Dick Swiveller is one of the most charming people in fiction; and that rake who became a hero, Sidney Carton, one of the most adored-especially by women; although I have my suspicions that Sidney Carton was created by Mr Martin Harvey, and not by Charles Dickens.

In the same way we are drawn towards the romantic rogues and vagabonds of history; towards kings who have had the wander-thirst and gone forth seeking adventure, like Richard the Lion-hearted; or to poets of wild, unreckoning ways, like François Villon and Byron, to troubadours and the student minstrels of Provence and Italy; or again to the wandering friars of medieval times. And many good folk grow enthusiastic over the careless Bohemianism which is the reputed life of artists. Nothing can rob the middle classes of this myth, and although they have many opportunities of learning that most poets and artists nowadays pride themselves on their respectability, the nimbus of romance has been placed about the brows of the Bohemian, and there it will remain.

There is romance even in the familiar tramp of the

highway, although he is considerably shorn of his glamour in these strenuous days when we have raised the accident which has made it necessary for most of us to work for a living into an ideal virtue. The idea is preposterous and the root of much evil.

But the genuine tramp shirks work on principle. Our laborious and regular ideals are not his. We like work, or pretend we do; he hates it, and has the courage of his convictions. He is quite practical and quite frank, and would never do an honest stroke of work year in year out, unless absolutely forced to do so. So long as he can get food and clothing to satisfy his needs by simply asking for them, he fulfils his self-chosen vocation. When he is hard pressed by evil fortune, he stoops to an odd job which, since such things are beneath him, he does not hesitate to scamp as much as possible. Yet, object to the fellow as we may, down in the bottom of our hearts there is something which responds not unkindly to the genuine tramp. We may pity the casual and hope to abolish him, but although we may hate the real tramp on principle, we cannot finally despise him.

England, like all lands with a failing peasantry, is a poor place for tramps, and yet with a little more practical sympathy what a paradise it might be for them, especially in the summer months! In Ireland, however, where national ideals are less material, he has a better time; in fact, in the less commercialised parts of that country he is still considered a human being with rights and even a

destiny. He can usually depend upon hospitality from the peasants, and, in return, he gives them of his store of worldly lore; often he is a teller of tales, and he is in some cases the inheritor of the traditions of the old Irish minstrelsy.

That the tramp is still a considerable figure in the life of Ireland may be seen by the large and, on the whole, friendly part he occupies in modern Irish plays and poems. One remembers the clever vagabond who is the central figure of W. B. Yeats' play, A Pot of Broth. But more particularly does one recollect the delightful tramps in the plays of J. M. Synge, tramps who are created not as romantic ideas, but as records of Irish life and character. In these tramps we see personified real joy in the simple and mysterious things of nature those things which come very close to what we call romance; who represent and seem to have convinced their compatriots of the fact that the tramp's lack of the desire of earthly goods is not altogether a vice.

In all countries there are these strange beings, living in the midst of the people but not of them : the weary Tramp of England, the nonchalant Hobo of America, the bronzed Sundowner of Australia, the sad-visaged Gorioun of Russia, no less than the more intimate associate of the peasantry, as the tramp usually is, in pastoral countries such as Ireland. But each in his way carries on the tradition of freedom, if only the almost lost tradition of freedom from the tyranny of owning things.

The call of the Open Road has long since made the amateur tramp a more and more familiar figure of our highways. People who live in houses are beginning to realise that there is no other way of seeing a country. Tramping is the most subtle and satisfying way of assimilating what beauty or charm a land may have; and, apart from the mere sensuous delight of the thing, there is no surer road to health of body or of mind. Tramping, indeed, has become one of the arts, and, like all art, it comes naturally to some, whilst others need tuition before they can use their materials with that certainty and dexterity necessary to the creation of joy out of good works. The open road has become practical politics. The opportunity of meeting life face to face, of tasting the joys of earth, comes to all of us now and then. Those who take it are wise; those who foster and woo the intimate call of the wild are wiser still. There are few habits so well worth cultivating as this habit of occasional lapse from the upholstery of civilised life, for in vagabondage we merge into the very source of life itself; civilisation is but its reflection, and often it is the reflection of a distorting glass. The tonic of the open road puts us once more in tune with reality.

JOHN M. SYNGE

OT very many years ago Mr W. B. Yeats was staying at one of those little hotels in the

Latin Quarter of Paris which are frequented chiefly by poor students, and whilst there he met an Irishman, who for economical reasons had taken a room at the top of the house. His name was John M. Synge, and he was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. There was a considerable dash of the wanderspirit in his personality, and this had set him roaming among the more picturesque people of Europe; he had played his fiddle to Italian sailors and Bavarian woodmen, and heard in exchange for his music such stories as these folk had to tell. His desire now was to become a writer, and he showed Yeats some specimens of the work he had done. These early works must have impressed the poet in some way, although not exactly as the young writer expected. There was evidently imaginative power in them, but this was hidden behind a screen of that artificiality, so prevalent at the time, which was born of pondering overmuch on methods of expression.

6 Yeats had just come from the remote Arran Islands, and the people living on those grey rocks had filled his imagination with the unexpressed