Poetry > Ballads in the Cumberland dialect

XVI
LIFE OF THE AUTHOB.
and never depressing them below it by too much
vulgarity. He holds them up often to laughter,
but never to contempt. He has the happy talent
of catching the ludicrous in every thing that
comes before him, and of expressing it with that
felicity which gives it in its full force to the
reader.
The locality and peculiar phraseology of his
Cumberland Ballads must necessarily circum¬
scribe their popularity; but their general merit
is such as will always find them admirers among
those who are acquainted with the provincial
idiom in which they are written, and with the
manners and scenes which they delineate.