lished 'Hades, or Transit,' and in 1846 The Year of the World,' both transcendenta. poems, mystical as Mr. Heraud's strains, but evidently prompted by admiration of Shelley. In 1854 Mr. Scott issued Poems by a Painter;' and in 1875 a volume of 'Poems, Ballads,' &c., with etchings by the author and by Alma Tadema.

MRS. SOUTHEY.

CAROLINE ANNE BOWLES (1787-1854) was the daughter of a retired officer, Captain Charles Bowles, of Buckland, near Lymington, Hants. She was, when young, deprived of her parents, and was left almost wholly to the care of the nurse, to whom she makes grateful reference in her writings. In her country retirement, she early cultivated literature, and produced successively Ellen Fitz-Arthur,' a poem, 1820; The Widow's Tale, and other Poems,' 1822; Solitary Hours, Prose and Verse,' 1826: 'Chapters on Churchyards '—a series of tales and sketches in prose, originally published in Blackwood's Magazine,' and reprinted in two volumes, 1829. A long and affectionate intimacy subsisted between Southey and Miss Bowles, and in 1839 they were married. The Athenæum' (Aug. 1854) states that no sacrifice could be greater than the one Miss Bowles made on this occasion. She resigned a larger income than she knew she would receive at Southey's death, and she 'consented to unite herself to him with a sure prevision of the awful condition of mind to which he would shortly be reduced-with a certain knowledge of the injurious treatment to which she might be exposed-from the purest motive that could actuate a woman in forming such a connection; namely, the faint hope that her devotedness might enable her, if not to avert the catastrophe, to acquire at least a legal title to minister to the sufferer's comforts, and watch over the few sad years of existence that might remain to him.' The laureate himself, in writing to his friend Walter Savage Landor on the subject of this second marriage, said he had, according to human foresight, judged well, and acted wisely;' but to his family it was peculiarly distasteful, except to one of its members, Edith May Southey, married to Mr. Warter, the editor of the posthumous edition of Southey's Doctor' and Commonplace Books.' To this lady, Mrs. Southey, in 1847-four years after the death of the laureate-dedicated a volume bearing the title of ‘Robin Hood: a Fragment, by the late Robert Southey and Caroline Southey; with other Fragments and Poems by R. S. and C. S.' So early as 1823, Southey had projected a poem on Robin Hood, and asked Caroline Bowles to form an intellectual union with him that it might be executed. Various efforts were made and abandoned. The metre selected by Southey was that of his poem of Thalaba- -a measure not only difficult, but foreign to all the ballad associations called up by the name of Robin Hood. Caroline Bowles, however, persevered, and we subjoin two stanzas of the portion contributed by her.

The poem was never completed: clouds were gathering the while,' says Mrs. Southey, and before the time came that our matured purpose should bear fruit, the fiat had gone forth, and "all was in the dust.' The remaining years of the poetess were spent in close retirement. She left behind her, it is said, upwards of twelve hundred letters from the pen of Southey. The writings of Mrs. Southey, both prose and verse, illustrate her love of retirement, her amiable character, and poetical susceptibilities. A vein of pathos, runs through most of the little tales or novelettes, and colours her poetry.

You moory down, so black and bare,
Was gorgeous then and gay
With golden gorse-bright blossoming-
As uone blooms nowaday.
The blackbird sings but seldom now
Up there in the old lime,

Where hours and hours he used to sing-
When I was in my prime.

Such cutting winds came never then
To pierce one through and through;
More softly fell the silent shower,
More balmily the dew.

The Pauper's

Tread softly-bow the head

In reverent silence bow

No passing-bell doth toll-
Yet an immortal soul
Is passing now.

Stranger! however great,

With lowly reverence bow; There's one in that poor shedOne by that paltry bedGreater than thou.

Beneath that Beggar's roof,

Lo! Death doth keep his state:
Enter-no crowds attend-
Enter-no guards defend
This palace-gate.

That pavement damp and cold
No smiling cour iers tread;
One silent woman stands

Death-bed.

Lifting with meagre hands
A dying head.

No mingling voices sound-
An infant wail alone;

A sob suppressed-again
That short deep gasp, and then
The parting groan.

O change-O wondrous change -
Burst are the prison bars-
This moment there, so low,
So agonized, and now
Beyond the stars!

O change-stupendous change!
There lies the s ulless clod:
The sun eternal breaks-
The new immortal wakes-
Wakes with his God.

JOHN EDMUND READE.

The first production of MR. READE appears to have been a volume entitled The Broken Heart and other Poems,' 1825. From that period up to 1868 he has published a long series of poems and dramas. Cain the Wanderer' and the Revolt of the Angels' in 1830; Italy,' 1838; Catiline' and 'The Deluge,' 1839; 'Sacred Poems,' 1843; 'Memnon,' 1844; Revelations of Life,' 1849; &c. Mr. Reade has lived to superintend and publish four collective editions of his poetical works (1851-1865). He has also written some novels, and two volumes of Continental Impressions (1847). The poem of 'Italy,' in the Spenserian stanza, recalls Byron's Childe Harold,' while the Revelations' resemble Wordsworth's 'Excursion.' We subjoin a few lines of description:

We looked toward

The sun. rayless and red; emerging slow

From a black canopy that lowered above

O'er a blue sky it hung where fleecy clouds

Swelled like how hills along the horizon's verge.

Down slanting to a sea of glory. or

O'er infinite plains in luminous repose.

Eastward the sulphurous thunder-clouds were rolled.
While on the lurid sky beneath was marked
The visibly falling storm. The western rays
Braided its molten edges, rising up

Like battlemented towers, their brazen fronts
Changing perturbedly: from which. half seen,
The imaginative eye could body forth
Spiritual forms of thrones and fallen powers,
Reflecting on their scarred and fiery fronts,
The splendours left behind them.

'Catiline,' a drama, is well conceived and executed; but here also Mr. Reade follows another poetical master, Ben Jonson.

WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED.

This gentleman (1802-1839) was early distinguished for scholarship and poetic talent. In conjunction with a school-fellow-the Rev. John Moultrie, who also wrote some pleasing poetry-Mr. Praed set up a paper called The Etonian;' and he was associated with Macaulay as a writer in Knight's Quarterly Magazine.' The son of a wealthy London banker, Mr. Praed was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; he studied for the bar, and having entered public life as a Conservative politician, sat in the House of Commons for English boroughs, and for a short period in 1835 held the office of Secretary of the Board of Control. His poetical pieces were contributed to periodicals, and were first collected by An American publisher in 1844. They are light, fashionable sketches, yet executed with great truth and sprightliness. The following is an excellent portrait of a wealthy English bachelor and humorist:

Quince.

Near a small village in th West,
Where many very worthy people
Eat, drink, play whist, and do their best
To guard from evil church and steeple,
There stood-alas! it stands no more!-

A tenement of brick and plaster,

Of which, for forty years and four,

My good friend Quince was lord and master.

Welcome was he in hut and hall,

To maids and matrons peers and peasants;

He wou the sympathies of all

By making puns and making presents.

Though all the parish was at strife,

He kept his counsel and his carriage,

And laughed, and loved a quiet life,

And shrunk from Chancery-suits and marriage.

Sound was his claret and his head.

Warm was his double ale and feelings;

His partners at the whist-club said

That he was faultless in his dealings.
He went to church but once a week,

Yet Dr. Poundtext always found him
An upright man, who studied Greek.
And liked to see his friends around him.

Asylums, hospitals, and schools

He used to swear were made to cozen;
All who subscribed to them were fools-
And he subscribed to half a dozen.
It was his doctrine that the poor
Were always able, never willing:
And so the beggar at the door

Had first abuse, and then a shilling.

Some public principles he had,

But was no flatterer nor fretter; He rapped his box when things were bad, And said: 'I cannot make them better.'" And much he loathed the patriot's snort, And much he scorned the placeman's snuffe And cut the fiercest quarrels short

With, Patience, gentlemen, and shuffle!'

For full ten years his pointer, Speed,
Had couched beneath his master's table;
For twice ten years his old white steed
Had fattened in his master's stable.
Old Quince averred upon his troth

They were the ugliest beasts in Devon;
And none knew why he fed them both
With his own hands, six days in seven.

Whene'er they heard his ring or knock,
Quicker than thought the village slatterns
Flung down the novel, smoothed the frock,
And took up Mrs. Glasse or patterns.
Alice was studying baker's bills;

Louisa looked the queen of knitters;
Jane happened to be hemming frills;

And Nell by chance was making fritters.

But all was vain. And while decay

Came like a tranquil moonlight o'er him, And found him gouty still and gay,

With no fair nurse to bless or bore him;

His rugged smile and easy chair,

His dread of matrimonial lectures,

His wig, his stick, his powdered hair,

Were themes for very strange conjectures.

Some sages thought the stars above

Had crazed him with excess of knowledge; Some heard he had been crossed in love Before he came away from college; Some darkly hinted that His Grace

Did nothing, great or small, without him; Some whispered, with a solemn face,

That there was something odd about him.

I found him at threescore and ten

A single man, but bent quite double;
Sickness was coming on him then

To take him from a world of trouble.
He prosed of sliding down the hill,
Discovered he grew older daily;
One frosty day he made his will,
The next he sent for Dr. Baillie.