There is no evidence that the dialogues of
George Meriton, or Snaith Marsh, had any wide circulation among the
Yorkshire peasantry, but there is abundant evidence that such was the
case with these five poems of Thomas Browne. Early in the nineteenth
century enterprising booksellers at York, Northallerton, Bedale, Otley,
and ,Knaresborough were turning out little chap-books, generally bearing
the title, Specimens of the Yorkshire Dialect, and consisting largely of
the dialect poems of Browne. These circulated widely in the country
districts of Yorkshire, and to this day one meets with peasants who take
a delight in reciting Browne's songs and eclogues.
Down to the close of the eighteenth century the authors of Yorkshire
dialect poetry had been men of education, and even writers by profession.
With the coming, of the nineteenth century the composition of such poetry
extends to men in a humbler social position. The working-man poet
appears on the scene and makes his presence felt in many ways. Early in
the century, David Lewis, a Knaresborough gardener, published, in one of
the chap-books to which reference has just been made, two dialect poems,
"The Sweeper and Thieves" and "An Elegy on the Death of a Frog"; they
were afterwards republished, together with some non-dialect verses, in a
volume entitled The Landscape and Other Poems (York, 1815) by the same
author.
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