Dear gentle Earl, you little know In judgment 'gainst your lordship's eyes; The dormant dignity of shrew. The K restored takes off the attainder, To Katharines lawfully baptized. But such as still, with ceaseless clamor, (The merry nymph with laughter choking) While he exhibits at her shrine The unhallowed form of Katharine; He formed it of the rudest ore Or freckle upon Nature's nose, He flattered not the unsightly flaw, No females louder, fiercer, worse. Dulcibellas, Celestinas, Say is there one more free from blame, One that enjoys a fairer fame, One more endowed with Christian graces, (Although I say it to our faces, And flattery we don't delight in,) Than Catherine at this present writing? Where but between the K and C? Which seems to keep in mild police, Who led them all so much astray? A character more full of spite! That stubborn back to bend unskillful, With angles hideous to behold To fight their battles tooth and nail. In page the first you're sagely told Here some will smile as if suspicious The simile was injudicious. Because in C A T they trace A Katharine of his own creating. In evil hour this simple Czar But cleared the stage of great and small. Besides these genial pleasantries, many shorter poems on local and temporary subjects enlivened the brilliant circle of which Miss Catherine Fanshawe formed so precious an ornament. Many have perished as occasional verses will perish, however happy. I insert one specimen to show how her lively fancy could embellish the merest trifle. When the Regent's Park was first laid out she parodied the two well-known lines from Pope's "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady:" "Here shall the spring its earliest sweets bestow, Here the first roses of the year shall blow," and by only altering one word of the first line, and a single letter of the second, changed their entire meaning, and rendered them applicable to the new resort of the Londoners: "Here shall the spring its earliest coughs bestow, Here the first noses of the year shall blow." One wonders what Pope would have thought of such a parody. It is really a great honor. But would he have thought so? XIV. MARRIED POETS. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING-ROBERT BROWNING. MARRIED poets! Charming words are these, significant of congenial gifts, congenial labor, congenial tastes;-quick and sweet resources of mind and of heart, a long future of happiness live in those two words. And the reality is as rare as it is charming. Married authors we have had of all ages and of all countries; from the Daciers, standing stiff and stately under their learning, as if it were a load, down to the Guizots, whose story is so pretty, that it would sound like a romance to all who did not know how often romance looks pale beside reality; from the ducal pair of Newcastle, walking stately and stiff under their strawberry-leafed coronets, to William and Mary Howitt, ornaments of a sect to whom coronets are an abomination. Married authors have been plentiful as blackberries, but married poets have been rare indeed! The last instance, too, was rather a warning than an example. When Caroline Bowles changed her own loved and honored name to become the wife of the great and good man Robert Southey, all seemed to promise fairly, but a slow and fatal disease had seized him even before the wedding-day, and darkened around him to the hour of his death. In the pair of whom I am now to speak, the very reverse of this sad destiny has happily befallen, and the health of the bride, which seemed gone forever, has revived under the influence of the climate of Italy, of new scenes, new duties, a new and untried felicity. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is too dear to me as a friend to be spoken of merely as a poetess. Indeed such is the influence of her manners, her conversation, her temper, her thousand sweet and attaching qualities, that they who know her best are apt to lose sight altogether of her learning and of her genius, and to H |