after a gallant struggle, but one which had been hopeless from the first.

P. 296, No. ccxxx. -Written soon after the death by shipwreck of Wordsworth's brother John.

P. 300, No. ccxxxii. 1. 4, 5, 7: In this, one of Shelley's posthumously published poems, it is certainly perplexing to find 'light' (lumen), 'light' (levis), and 'delight' (delicia) all rhyming together; for although such rhymes in cases where the letters, though identical, do not constitute the same word, are recognized in Italian, and are too frequent in Spenser, and not altogether disallowed by Milton, they have been tacitly discarded in later English poetry; two such syllables rhyming together are rare, three, as here, are almost unknown. Mr. Garnett, who had some MSS. of Shelley's at his command, proposes, in his Relics of Shelley, p. 93, for 'light,' v. 4, to read might.' But, provokingly enough, having said of the emendations which he suggests that they fall naturally into two classes, first, those for which there is MS. authority, and secondly those which (the original not being extant) are sufficiently recommended by internal evidence,' he does not inform us to which of these classes this belongs. If to the class of conjectural, I should have no hesitation in rejecting it at once. Another emendator, leaving this line untouched, would for 'light' substitute slight' in the verse following. This also may be certainly set aside. It is more of a question whether for moist air' we should not read 'moist earth'; though here also Mr. Garnett fails to tell us whether the alteration is guesswork, or the restoration of what Shelley wrote.

P. 303, No. ccxxxv.-I had intended, but by an accident have not fulfilled my intention, to find room for another brief but exquisite dirge by the same author; which, however, the reader shall not lose, above all as I am able to append to it a translation in Greek by one whose initials will be recognized by many.

"To her couch of evening rest,

'Neath the sun's divinest west,

Bear we in the silent car

This consumed incense-star,

This dear maid, whose life is fled,

And whose sweets are sweetly dead.'

ἠρέμα κοίτην εἰς ἑσπερίην,
ὑπὸ δειελινῆς ἡλίου αὐγῆς,
ψαφαροῖσι τροχοῖς ἐκφορέωμεν
τήνδε σελήνην ἐκκαυθεῖσαν,

λιβανωτοφόρον,

παρθένον ἀβράν, ᾗ βίος οίχεται,
ἢ φίλον ἄνθος θαλερᾶς ήβης

ἥδισθ' ἥδιστον όλωλεν.-W. S.

1

P. 304, No. ccxxxvii.-There is a touching notice of David Gray, and appreciative review of the small volume of posthumous poems which he left in the Edinburgh Review, vol. cxv. p. 567, I believe by Lord Houghton; who had shown him kindness when living, which he thus continued to him dead. And Robert Buchanan who knew him well, in a volume published last year (David Gray and other Essays), has told more at full the story of his life. He had a real gift, though there is nothing in the volume to give one confident assurance that in him we have one of the 'inheritors of unfulfilled renown,' of whom Shelley in his Adonais speaks.

P. 316, No. ccxlix.-This, if I mistake not, is the only poem by Herbert Knowles which survives. It appeared first in The Quarterly Review, vol. ii. p. 396, with this account of the writer: His life had been eventful and unfortunate, till his extraordinary merits were discovered by persons capable of appreciating and willing and able to assist him. He was then placed under a kind and able instructor, and arrangements had been made for supporting him at the University; but he had not enjoyed that prospect many weeks before it pleased God to remove him to a better world. The reader will remember that they are the verses of a schoolboy, who had not long been taken from one of the lowest stations of life, and he will then judge what might have been expected from one who was capable of writing with such strength and originality upon the tritest of all subjects.' It was Southey, I believe, who wrote thus, in whose estimate of these verses I entirely concur; as it was he who was prepared to befriend the youthful poet, if he had not passed so soon beyond the reach and need of human help.

P. 322, No. ccliv.-Forster has said truly (Walter Savage Landor, vol. i. p. 497), The deep and tender pathos of that little poem could hardly be surpassed, and in delicacy and sweetness it is perfect' -and Charles Lamb, in a letter to Landor, I have lived upon it for weeks.' The lady was one of Lord Aylmer's family, 'regarded by Landor always with a very tender sentiment' (Forster). She went to India and there died suddenly, while yet very young.

P. 328, No. cclx.-It is not a little remarkable that one to whom English was an acquired language, who can have had little or no experience in the mechanism of English verse, should yet have left us what Coleridge does not hesitate to call, the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language'-words, it is true, which he slightly modifies by adding, at least it is only in Milton and in Wordsworth that I remember any rival.'

P. 329, No. cclxi.-A Danish ballad, found in a collection published as early as 1591, and of which a translation may be seen in

Notes and Queries, Oct. 26, 1867, seems to have furnished the first hint of this poem.

P. 333, No. cclxii.—Henry More (Philosophical Works, p. 100) records and gives credit to the legend on which this poem is founded: The story of the pied Piper, that first by his pipe gathered together all the rats and mice, and drowned them in the river; and afterwards, being defrauded of his reward, which the town promised him if he could deliver them from the plague of those vermin, took his oppor tunity, and by the same pipe made the children of the town follow him, and leading them into a hill that opened, buried them there all alive; has so evident proof of it in the town of Hammel where it was done, that it ought not at all to be discredited. For the fact is very religiously kept among their ancient records, painted out also in their church-windows, and is an epoch joined with the year of our Lord in their bills and indentures and other law instruments.'

P. 354, No. cclxxv.-This poem is drawn from a small volume with the title, David and Samuel, with other Poems, published in the year 1859. Much in the volume can claim no exemption from the doom which before very long awaits all verse except the very best. Yet one or two poems have caught excellently well the tone, half serious, half ironical, of Goethe's lighter pieces; while more than one of the more uniformly serious, this above all, seem to me to have remarkable merit. It finds its motive, as I need hardly say, in the resolution of the Dutch, when their struggle with the overwhelming might of Louis XIV. and his satellite Charles II. seemed hopeless, to leave in mass their old home, and to found another Holland among their possessions in the Eastern world. I believe that I break no confidence in mentioning that Robertson is here the nom de plume of one who has since in prose awakened an interest and achieved a reputation which it was not given to his verse to do.

P. 356, No. cclxxvi.-During the last Chinese war the following passage occurred in a letter of the Correspondent of The Times: Some Seiks, and a private of the Buffs, having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning, they were brought before the authorities, and commanded to perform the kotou. The Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill.'

P. 358, No. cclxxvii.-Turner's fine picture of the Téméraire, a grand old man-of-war (it had been, as its name indicates, taken from the French), towed into port by a little ugly steamer, that so, after all its noble toils, it might there be broken up, is itself a poem of a very high order, which has here been finely rendered into verse.

P. 379, No. ccc.-Tithonus is a noble variation on Juvenal's noble line in the 10th Satire, where, enumerating the things which a wise man may fitly pray for, he includes among these the mind and temper,

'Qui spatium vitæ extremum inter munera ponat
Naturæ ;'

words which, grand as they are, reappear in still grander form, even as they are brought into a more intimate connection with this poem in Dryden's translation,

'And count it nature's privilege to die.'

P. 387, No. cccvi.-Few readers of this and other choice specimens of American poetry-some of which have now for the first time found their way into any English anthology-but will share the admiration which I cannot refuse to express for many among them. It is true that they are not always racy of the soil, that sometimes they only do what has been as well done, though scarcely better, in the old land; but whether we regard the perfect mechanism of the verse, the purity and harmony of the diction, the gracious thoughts so gracefully embodied, these poems, by Whittier, by Bryant, by Holmes, by Emerson, and by others, do, so far as they reach, leave nothing to be desired.