they show that his earliest intention was to treat the theme in a dramatic form. It is strange that in this day of incessant reproduction and republication these most interesting documents have never been presented to the public. It would be exceedingly interesting to note in what form the essentially epic story of the Fall of Man originally impressed the imagination of Milton before his unerring instinct for art led him on the better way.

To return to Vondel and the Dutch drama, we find that the veteran poet survived the production of his Lucifer by a quarter of a century, dying five years after Milton, though more than twenty years his senior. Almost till the day of his death he laboured at the improvement of the literature of his country. But he had the mortification, whilst outliving every one of his great contemporaries, whether in poetry or philosophy-for even Spinoza, the last great Dutchman, died before him-of seeing the romantic and lyric practice of his youth entirely set aside in favour of the rhetorical and artificial manner of the French, which, spreading over Europe like a plague, did not spare the literature of Holland, and this in spite of the Forty Years' War and all the personal hatred for France. In the year 1672, the poet Antonides, the last friend of Vondel, and lover of the old school, lamented that the whole literature of his country had become the ape of the French; and by the time of Vondel's death this sterile rhetoric had deformed every branch of letters and learning. A history of the lifetime of Joost van den Vondel is a chronicle of the whole rise and decline of the literature of Holland.

E. W. G.

My Neighbour's life!

HARK! Hark to my neighbour's flute!
Yon powder'd slave, that ox, that ass are his :
Hark to his wheezy pipe; my neighbour is
A worthy sort of brute.

My tuneful neighbour's rich-has houses, lands,
A wife (confound his flute-a handsome wife!) :
Her love must give a gusto to his life.

See yonder-there she stands.

She turns, she gazes, she has lustrous eyes,
A throat like Juno, and Aurora's arms-
Per Bacco, what a paragon of charms!

My neighbour's drawn a prize.

Yet, somehow, life's a nuisance with its woes,
Sin and disease-and that eternal preaching:
We've suffer'd from our early pious teaching-
We suffer-goodness knows.

How vain the wealth that breeds its own vexation,

Yet few appear to care to quite forego it!

Then weariness of life (and many know it)
Isn't a glad sensation :

And therefore, neighbour mine, without a sting
I contemplate thy fields, thy house, thy flocks;
I covet not thy man, thine ass, thine ox,

Thy flute, thy-anything.

FREDERICK LOCKER.

617

Erema; or, My Father's Sin.

CHAPTER XXX.

COCKS AND COXCOM BS.

AJOR HOCKIN brought
the only fly as yet to be
found in Bruntsea, to
meet me at Newport,
where the railway ended
at present, for want of
further encouragement.
"Very soon you go,"
he cried out to the bulk-
heads, or buffers, or
whatever are the things
that close the career of
a land-engine. "Station-
master, you are very
wise in putting in your
very best cabbage plants
there. You understand
your own Company.
Well done! If I were

to offer you a shilling

apiece for those young early Yorks, what would you say now?"

66

Weel, a think I should say nah, Sir," the Scotch Station-master made answer with a grin, while he pulled off his cap of office, and put on a dissolute Glengarry; "they are a veery fine young kail, that always pays for planting."

"The villain!" said the Major as I jumped into the fly. "However, I suppose he does quite right. Set a thief to watch a thief. The Company are big rogues; and he tries to be a bigger. We shall cut through his garden in about three months, just when his cabbages are getting firm, and their value will exceed that of pine-apples. The surveyor will come down and certify, and the damage to crops,' will be at least five pounds, when they have no right to sow even mustard and cress; and a saucepan would hold all the victuals on the land."

From this I perceived that my host was as full of his speculative schemes as ever. And soon he made the driver of the one-horse fly turn

VOL. XXXV.-NO. 209.

30.