21 CHAPTER III. A POOR CURATE AMONG HIS PARISHIONERS. SOME of my readers may, probably, wish to know more than I have told them of the interesting and eloquent young curate, from whose "Remains" I have quoted. Charles Wolfe was born in Dublin, December 14th, 1791. He was the youngest son of Theobald Wolfe, of the County Kildare, a family of some distinction. General Wolfe, who was killed at the siege of Quebec, and the noble and good Irish Judge, Lord Kilwarden, were relations of his. Charles Wolfe lost his father at an early age, and was sent to Bath to school in 1801. From Bath he went to Salisbury, and from that to Winchester. In 1809 he entered the University of Dublin, where he gained a scholarship. In 1817 he was ordained to the curacy of Donoughmore. His habits and manner of life, as a clergyman, were exceedingly simple and primitive. He scarcely ever thought of providing a regular meal. His small cottage contained a few rush-bottomed chairs, a rickety table, and two trunks-one for his papers and the other for his linen. The trunks also did service by covering the broken parts of the floor. The damp paper hung in loose festoons from the mouldy walls of the closet where he slept-a dangerous apartment for a young man of a consumptive habit. Between the parlour and the closet was the kitchen, the warmest and most comfortable room of the three. This was occupied by his man-servant, a disbanded soldier, and by his maid-servant, the soldier's wife, with a numerous band of children, who seemed more at home in the house, than the curate, who paid the rent. Charles Wolfe was very kind to the poor of his parish, and took a lively interest in their temporal as well as in their spiritual welfare. When some of them informed him that they could not go to church, for want of shoes, he purchased a large quantity, of all sizes, which he gave out on Saturday evenings, to be returned on Monday mornings; but this return, we suspect, was not always made, especially when a fair was nigh.. CHAPTER IV. LORD BYRON'S OPINION OF THE POET. CHARLES WOLFE was not only a preacher of very great power and beauty, but also a poet of a very high order. His Ode, or "Elegy, on the Burial of Sir John Moore" stands almost alone in its pathos, beauty, and perfection. This poem has done more to immortalise that noble soldier, Sir John Moore, than a thousand marble monuments, like that under the dome of St. Paul's. At an after-dinner conversation, between Lord Byron and Shelley, recorded by Captain Medwin, the question arose as to which was the most perfect ode of the day. Shelley contended for Coleridge's Ode on Switzerland, commencing "Ye clouds." Moore's Melodies were quoted, and some one mentioned Campbell's Hohenlinden; when Lord Byron started up and said-"I will show you an Ode you have never seen, that I consider little inferior to the best which the present prolific age has brought forth. He left the table and returned with a magazine, from which he read the wellknown lines on the "Burial of Sir John Moore," commencing : "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, "The feeling," says Medwin, "with which he recited these admirable stanzas, I shall never forget. After he had come to the end, he repeated the third, and said it was "perfect, particularly the lines, "But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, |