Ah, would 'twere so with many

A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any

Writhed not at passèd joy?
To know the change and feel it
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.

KEATS' LAST SONNET.

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
No-yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852), a lawyer, was the friend of Keats and later of Hood, and is typical of the Cockney school of poets in its less inspired moments. His best work was a romantic poem, The Garden of Florence, 1821; but he also published a skit on Wordsworth's Peter Bell in 1819, and a very brilliant apology for prize-fighting, in prose and verse, called The Fancy, 1820. Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800-1879) belonged to the same group, but left it early. His drama entitled Joseph and his Brethren appeared in 1824. Wells was daunted by want of recognition and withdrew to France, breaking off all commerce with his old friends, most of whom he long survived. A reply of Potiphar's wife, Phraxanor, has been universally admired for its "quiet, heavy malice, worthy of Shakespeare"; Joseph cries:

Let me pass out at door.

Moore

And Phraxanor answers :

I have a mind

You shall at once walk with those honest limbs

Into your grave.

The friend and biographer of Byron, THOMAS MOORE, was in sympathy with the poets of revolution, and was long associated with them in popular estimation. At the present moment Moore is extremely disdained by the critics, and has the greatest possible difficulty in obtaining a fair hearing. He is scarcely mentioned, save to be decried and ridiculed. This is a reaction against the reputation which Moore long continued to enjoy on 1 Mr. Swinburne, in his "Prefatory Note" to the 1876 reprint of Joseph and his Brethren.

rather slight grounds, but it is excessive. As a lyrical satirist, his lightness

of touch and buoyant wit give an Horatian flavour to those collections of epistles and fables of which The Fudge Family in Paris began a series. But the little giddy bard had a serious side; he was profoundly incensed at the unsympathetic treatment of his native island by England, and he seized the "dear harp of his country" in an amiable frenzy of Hibernian sentiment. The result was a huge body of songs and ballads, the bulk of which are now, indeed, worthless, but out of which a careful hand can select eight or ten that defy the action of time, and preserve their wild, undulating melancholy, their sound as of bells dying away in the

distance. The artificial prettiness and smoothness of Moore are seen to

perfection in his chain of Oriental romances,

Lalla Rookh, and these, it is to be feared, are tarnished beyond all recovery.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was the son of a grocer and spirit-dealer, a Kerry man and a Catholic, who kept a shop in Little Aungier Street, Dublin, where Moore was born on the 28th of May 1779. He was educated at Samuel Whyte's grammar school in Dublin. In 1794 he proceeded to Trinity College, and here Robert Emmett was his close friend. He early gained a great reputation for his brilliant skill in musical improvisation. He was very nearly involved in the United Ireland Conspiracy, and it was perhaps to escape suspicion that he came to London in 1799, becoming a student at the Middle Temple. In 1800 appeared his Cdes of Anacreon, and in 1801 his Poems of the late Thomas Little, in which pseudonym he made an allusion to his own diminutive stature. Moore was taken at once to the bosom of English fashionable society, and through the influence of his friend,

Moore's Birthplace in Dublin

Lord Moira, was made in 1803 Admiralty Registrar at Bermuda. He went out, but soon left a deputy behind him to do the work, and passed on to travel in the United States. In 1806 Moore published his Odes and Epistles, which were savagely reviewed in the "Edinburgh"; Moore, in consequence, challenged Jeffrey to a

duel at Chalk Farm. This ridiculous incident increased Moore's fashionable notoriety, and with Jeffrey he struck up a warm friendship. In 1807 he began the publication of his Irish Melodies, the tenth and last instalment of which did not appear until 1834; for this work Moore was paid nearly £13,000. In 1811 Moore formed the friendship of Byron, and married a young actress, Bessie Dyke; the young couple settled at Kegworth, in Leicestershire. The Twopenny Post-Bag belongs to 1813, the Elegy on Sheridan to 1816. In 1817 appeared Lalla Rookh, for which Longman gave a sum larger than had ever previously been given for a single poem, £3000. The success of this narrative was not unwelcome, for in 1818 a dreadful calamity fell upon Moore; his deputy in Bermuda absconded, leaving the poet responsible for £6000. Moore was obliged to quit England until he could arrange his affairs, and until 1822 he resided in France and Italy. During this period of exile he wrote abundantly, and to it belong the publication of The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and Rhymes on the Road (1823). Lord Lansdowne persuaded the Admiralty to reduce

A View of Bermuda

the debt to £1000; this Moore was able to pay, and returned to London. His marriage was in the highest degree a happy and united one, but his wife and he had the deep sorrow of seeing their five children die before them. Moore brought with him from Paris The Loves of the Ang Is, which was published in 1823. He settled, to be near Lord Lansdowne, at Bowood, in the cottage at Sloperton in Wiltshire, where he had been residing at the time of his misfortunes. His next works of importance were the Life of Sheridan in 1825, the romance of The Epicurean in 1827, and the Life and Litters of Byron in 1830. He now wasted several years in an attempt to write an encyclopedic history of Ireland: he was overwhelmed with the task, and before it was completed his health and mind gave way. In 1846, after the death of his only surviving child, he sank into a state of mental infirmity. In this pitiable condition he lingered until the 25th of February 1852, when he died at Sloperton Cottage, and was buried at Bromham. Moore was a small, brisk man of great sociable accomplishment, an amiable spendthrift, a butterfly of the salons, yet an honest, good, and loyal friend. His foible was a too frivolous penchant for the pleasures of life; and even in his patriotism, which was sincere, and in his religion, which was deep, he affected a somewhat over-playful roguishness.

Moore's Cottage at Sloperton

FROM "IRISH MELODIES."

At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly

To the lone vale we lov'd, when life shone warm in thine eye;
And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air
To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there,
And tell me our love is remembered, even in the sky.

Then I sang the wild song 'twas once such pleasure to hear!
When our voices commingling breathed, like one, on the ear;
And, as Echo far off through the vale my sad orison rolls,
I think, oh my love! 'tis thy voice from the Kingdom of Souls,
Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear.

TO IRELAND.

When he who adores thee has left but the name

Of his fault and his sorrows behind,

Oh! say wilt thou weep, when they darken the fame
Of a life that for thee was resigned?

Yes, weep, and however my foes may condemn,
Thy tears shall efface their decree ;

For Heaven can witness, though guilty to them,

I have been but too faithful to thee.

With thee were the dreams of my earliest love;
Every thought of my reason was thine;

In my last humble prayer to the Spirit above,
Thy name shall be mingled with mine.

Oh! blest are the lovers and friends who shall live

The days of thy glory to see ;

But the next dearest blessing that Heaven can give

Is the pride of thus dying for thee.

The five years from 1816 to 1821 were the culminating years of the Rogers romantic movement. The spirit of poetry

invaded every department of English; there were birds in every bush, and wild music burdened every bough. In particular, several writers of an older school, whom the early movement of Wordsworth and Coleridge had silenced, felt themselves irresistibly moved to sing once more, and swell the new choir with their old voices; it was cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet. Among those who had loved more than twenty years before was SAMUEL ROGERS, who came forward with a Jacqueline bound up with Byron's Lara-strange incongruity, a Methody spinster on the arm of a dashing dragoon. Save on this solitary occasion, however, the amiable Muse of Rogers never forgot what was due to her

self-respect, and clung close to the manner of Goldsmith, slowly and faintly

Samuel Rogers

relaxing the rigour of versification in a blank verse Italy, but never, in a single graceful line, quite reaching the point of poetry.

Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) was one of the eight children of Thomas Rogers, the son of a glass manufacturer of Stourbridge, and his wife Mary Radford; he was born in his father's London house on Newington Green, on the 30th of July 1763. Rogers was sent to private schools at Hackney; at a very early age he entered the bank in London of which his father

possessed a share. In the last year of Dr. Johnson's life, Rogers went to call on that great man, but when he had his hand on the knocker his courage failed, and he retreated. His mind. was, however, by this time wholly given to literature, and in 1786 he published his first volume, An Ode to Superstition, with other poems. In 1789 he rode from London to Edinburgh on a literary expedition to the Northern wits, and was warmly received; but missed seeing Burns. In 1792 Rogers published The Pleasures of Memory, which achieved a great success. Until the death of his father in 1793 Rogers had continued to live with his father in the Newington Green house; he inherited the principal interest in the banking house, and the rest of the family dispersing, he began to live at Newington in the style of a wealthy man. In 1798 he published his Epistle to a Friend, and sold the house which had hitherto been his home. He settled in London, and began to cut a prominent figure in society. He presently built a house in St. James's Place overlooking Green Park, which he fitted up with exquisite specimens of antique art and fur

From a Caricature

narrative poem called Jacqueline appeared in the same volume with Lara in 1814. A didactic piece, Human Life, was printed in 1819, and in 1822 the first part of Italy,

!