stance of all the appetencies, tendencies, and consequences of military.' Is there any casual reader who has ever been able to put out of his head the divinely droll first lines:

"The mountain sheep are sweeter,

But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.'

Was comic verse ever more august? And of wine-songs is there any, outside Burns (and with how great a difference!), in which a poetic decorum dignifies revel more effectually than in the refrain:

'And our ballast is old wine,
And your ballast is old wine'?

There is another after-dinner ballad, 'In life three ghostly friars were we,' and a 'Hail to the Headlong,' mere cataract of sound, as 'The Three Little Men' and the chorus of 'Our balances, our balances' are afterwards to be, in the later parodies of politics: all these have their place among Peacock's cleverest ingenuities. When he is serious and lengthy, as in the 'Rhododaphne,' which Shelley thought worth liking, every poetical quality deserts him except a faint and ineffectual eloquence. But there are two lyrics of a delicate tenderness, 'In the Days of Old' and 'Love and Age,' in which he is content to remember the past and to sing from memory out of a lover's experience.

JOHN WILSON (1785-1841) 1

WILSON left minor poems in which he tries to be a 'Lakepoet,' even writing lines on an ass, though on an Ass in a Dutch picture. Much of the verse is almost as prettified as

* (1) The Isle of Palms, 1812. (2) The City of the Plague, 1816. (3) Works, 1855-58.

that of Thomas Moore, though the sentiment of it is better. None of the reflections on the subjects of the day, ruined abbeys, the banks of Windermere, moonlight at sea, midnight on Helm Crag, the voice of departed friendship, can now be read with any attention. The continual faint fancy of these and of the long poem, 'The Isle of Palms,' which is too thin a cobweb for a spider to hang by, wearies the reader who asks for imagination. The longest poem of all, 'The City of the Plague,' a rhapsody divided into acts and scenes, is one of the weakest and most lavish pieces of sensational extravagance in our language, much fiercer and feebler than anything in the Elizabethan tragedy of blood. Beddoes might have made something, within a brief space, of this nightmare subject, but there is none of his mastery of the grotesque in this long eloquent raving, these 'horrid demons in a dream.' 'The Convict,' which is shorter, and aims at a kind of realism, though it is nearly as horrible, has some of the merit of melodrama. But whether we are served, as in the minor poems, with sighs, or, in these lengthy compositions, with yells, there is an equal failure to make any articulate form of art out of either. Everything that is superficial and second-rate in the 'Noctes Ambrosianae,' their haste and heat, are here; but no more than a glimpse of the qualities to which Christopher North owes a name better known than his own.

SIR AUBREY DE VERE (1786-1846) 1

WORDSWORTH said of the sonnets of Sir Aubrey de Vere that they were' among the most perfect of our age'; and the author, in dedicating them to him, hoped 'to be named hereafter as one among the friends of Wordsworth.' Not always perfect as sonnets, they have often both intellectual symmetry and moral distinction; many of them are 'trophies,' resonant

1 (1) Julian the Apostate, 1822. (2) The Duke of Mercia, 1823. (3) The Song of Faith, 1842. (4) Mary Tudor, 1847.

CAROLINE ANNE BOWLES SOUTHEY

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with the clarions of Crusaders, and with homages and condemnations of kings. There is in some of them, not least in such religious ones as that on 'Universal Prayer,' a noble Wordsworthian quality, worthy of Wordsworth's praise.

CAROLINE ANNE BOWLES SOUTHEY (1786-1854) 1

THE poems of Mrs. Southey, now as forgotten as her husband's, are of a far finer quality. They show the continual influence of Wordsworth, but at its best the influence passes almost into personal creation. She is full of gentle meditation over passing things, flowers and animals, above all, dogs, and there is a genuinely womanly quality in her poems, full of tenderness and quiet observation. Often a phrase has fine precision, as in:

'Finding thine own distress

With accurate greediness.'

The lyrics, though they tend to become monotonous, are more than facile; they have often a distinction of a personal kind. There is no strong emotion in them, but delicate insight, natural simplicity, a choiceness of phrase and cadence. A long poem in blank verse, which has almost a suggestion of Jane Austen in its slightly formal detail, is written in a style of easy colloquialism which seems midway between the verse of 'The Prelude' and that of 'Aurora Leigh.' Lines like these might almost have been found in 'Bishop Blougram':

'True, they seem starving; but 't is also true

The parish sees to all those vulgar wants;
And when it does not, doubtless there must be -
Alas! too common in this wicked world

Some artful imposition in the case.'

Caroline Southey was an artist, and has been undeservedly forgotten.

1 (1) Ellen Fitzarthur, 1820. (2) The Widow's Tale, 1822. (3) Tales of the Factories, 1823. (4) Solitary Hours, prose and verse, 1826. (5) The Birthday, 1836.

GEORGE BEATTIE (1786-1823) 1

GEORGE BEATTIE was a crofter's son, who, having fallen in love with a woman who had encouraged him until she came into some money, 'died of despair,' his strange biographer, a Mr. Mt. Cyrus, tells us. The last confession which he wrote before going out to shoot himself ('a dying man may surely be allowed to state what he believed or rather knew to be the fact') is a document of value in the study of human nature. We see, in the incoherent assurances, the wild, scarcely sane excitement of a man brooding over 'the deep and indelible wrongs' done to him. Most of his poems are personal, and delineate bad dreams, or shipwreck, or the scene of murder; but there are one or two lyrics, like the 'Fragment' with the refrain 'Igo and ago,' which have a lilt of their own. His best work was the ballad of 'John O'Arnha,' done under the influence of Burns; there is a wild hurrying fancy in it, tossed about by weird demons, 'grisly ghaists,' and 'whinnering goblins'; 'a waesome, wan, wanliesum sight!' The verse gallops like a witch on her broomstick, riding against the wind.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD (1787-1855) ?

MISS MITFORD tells us that the need of making money 'made it a duty to turn away from the lofty steep of Tragic Poetry to the every-day path of Village Stories.' We may have gained, in getting 'Our Village,' but there is a nearer approach to both poetry and drama in the plays, now completely for

1 George Beattie, of Montrose, a Poet, a Humourist, and a Man of Genius, by A. S. Mt. Cyrus, M. A., no date [1863?].

(1) Poems, 1810. (2) Christina, 1811. (3) Blanche of Castile, 1812. (4) Watlington Hill, 1812. (5) Narrative Poems on Female Characters, 1813. (6) Julian, 1823. (7) Foscari, 1826. (8) Rienzi, 1828. (9) Charles I, 1834. (10) Sadak and Kalasrade, 1836. (11) Dramatic Works, 2 vols., 1854.

gotten, than most people are likely to imagine. The most serious of them is 'Charles I,' which George Colman, then Censor, would not allow to be acted. There was no danger to the state in it, and it has some fine characterisation, together with dignified and pathetic speech. In several of the other plays the action is allowed to run quite wild, and preposterous horrors traverse the stage in an almost artless profusion. What is curious is, that even in scenes of chaotic impossibility, there is a certain kind of human feeling which comes through a thin and uncertain verse, which can pass unconsciously from such dreadful dissonances as:

'That on a point of time so brief, that scarce
The sand wags in the hour-glass, hangs man's all,'

to so assured a cadence as:

"The mind of man

When fashioning the myriad sounds that lend
A winged life to thought, ne'er framed a name
For the slayer of his children.'

The people are for the most part martyrs, fanatics, parricides, always headstrong, often light-hearted in the midst of disasters partly of their causing; and the action turns generally about a tangle of unlikely crimes. These unnatural deeds, which were meant to create a vivid drama, defeat the nature in the words of characters whose speech is often so probable. It is all a woman's world, a kind of soft and touching, sometimes thrilling melodrama. The people, in the midst of confusions and catastrophes, are intensely alert, and their frenzies are often touched by a kind of irrelevant and not quite achieved beauty. You feel behind them a capable, enthusiastic woman, writing too loosely, with too feminine a sense of romance, but not without a natural impulse, a ready and human eloquence.