of suffering; and there the matter is often left. It is, of course, quite true that Hood looked on life as a sad and serious thing; in his circumstances it could hardly have been otherwise: "There's not a string attuned to mirth," he writes, "but has its chord of melancholy." But his constant advice, both explicit and implied, is to make the best of it. There is a bright side to everything, if we only take the trouble to look for it—

"Beshrew those sad interpreters of nature,
Who gloze her lively universal law;

As if she had not formed our cheerful feature
To be so tickled with the slightest straw!

So let them vex their mumping mouths, and draw
The corners downwards like a watery moon,
And deal in gusty sighs and rainy flaw.
We will not woo foul weather all too soon,
Or nurse November on the lap of June,
For ours are winging sprites, like any bird,
That shun all stagnant settlements of grief,
This is our small philosophy in brief."

In Hood we find no Titanic effort to reconcile the irreconcilable; to bring individual happiness into harmony with human progress. He is no baffled cynic like Byron, no "ineffectual angel" like Shelley, no passionate idealist like Keats, no contemplative recluse like Wordsworth; he faces the facts of life and seeks for happiness in a man's self, in his good humour, and his charity. With Sir Walter Scott he is content "to consider everything as moonshine compared with the education of the heart." Altogether Hood is such a good fellow, and wrote so much that is charming, that one feels almost inclined to risk the charge of neglecting his faults. After all it is by his best works that a poet is to be judged, and "praise, praise, praise," we have it on authority, is the critic's function. Hood's most obvious fault has already been alluded to several times. It is the habit of piling up effects and accessories more than the passage can well bear. Besides this, he wrote

a considerable quantity of rather poor stuff. The circumstances of his life will account for much of this, but not all. Even in those poems on which he must have spent the most care, we find frequent lapses; and it is hard to imagine, if Hood really tested his poems by writing them out in printed characters, how many of the verses passed muster. But this fault was the penalty of that very absence of restraint and boldness of expression which enabled him to reach such heights in other passages. At any rate he sins in good company; and a later age, whose poetry suffers from a tendency to over-nice preciseness or over-studied ruggedness, may well allow bold, unaffected freedom of touch to cover a multitude of sins.

After a sketch, which has been in the main analytical, it may seem presumptuous to put forward a claim for a consideration of Hood's work, as a whole. But, though each characteristic of Hood's genius predominates in turn, it never does so to the exclusion of the rest. The man is essentially the same, whatever the point of view. Surely then it cannot be wrong to raise from the doubtful company of minor poets one who, to a deep, poetic imagination, a fine lyrical gift, and unusual powers of expression, added a delicate fancy, a delightful humour, and a broad-minded humanity.

C. R. M.

NIL DESPERANDUM.

O THOU to whom this life may seem
A weary load scarce worth the pain;
And all thine aspirations vain,
And all thy happiness a dream:

In thine own heart are heaven and hell,
And in thy hand is sorrow's balm;
For memory lulls to happy calm,

The tempest of a life lived well.

And sorrow born of ought but sin

Is never sorrow to the end:

But owns, ere long, the name of friend, And dwells, a pensive guest, within.

Tho' sin, rebelling in thy blood

Impure from wells of what hath been,
From mastery of the soul be seen
To stem awhile the tide of good,

And pluck the flower from thy path
And dim the sunshine in thy sky,
And God forbidding thou should'st die,
Oft make thee half content with death:

Yet those are but thy darker moods,

And sweet is nature tho' in tears; And summers gild the growing years, And sunbeams melt the winter woods.

C. E. B.'

THE RIVER.

THE whispering river wanders down
In sorrow to the sea,

And thro' the wailing of the town
It sadly sings to me.

O where is now the happy glen
Of my pure childhood's years,
Before I found the haunts of men,
And mingled with their tears?

A dimpling brook I once did flow
With silvery pebbles paved,
And mirrored in my pools below
The glancing willows waved.

And so my merry morn of life
I lightly laughed away;

And little recked of storm and strife
As children at their play.

But now my face is sad and worn
With human sin and stain:
For ocean's lips I sigh forlorn
To kiss away my pain.

The stream of life so wanders down

In sorrow to the sea,

And thro' the wailing of the town

So sadly sings to me.

C. E. B.

A MISSING MANUSCRIPT.

(With every apology to the shade of Sir Richard Burton.)

AVING occasion not long ago to visit my gyproom to procure a pot of Keiller wherewith to do honour to an unexpected friend, I noticed on the table my accustomed allowance of butter. It was, as usual, wrapped in a sheet of paper which showed marks of writing on the outer surface, but my attention was at once arrested by the peculiar characters of which the writing was composed. At first I thought it was shorthand, but the system was certainly not Pitman's, and a closer inspection soon convinced me that what I had mistaken for shorthand was really some strange character-though precisely what, my acquaintance with strange characters did not enable me to say. That I had seen something like it in a glass. case in the University Library I was certain, and for a moment the wild thought flashed into my mind that the Librarian had pawned the Codex Bezae, but this I dismissed at once as an insult to my own intelligence and a reflexion both on the personal character of the Librarian and on the extent of his knowledge of the fluctuations of the waste-paper market.

After some hesitation I determined to carry my discovery direct to the depository of all human learningProfessor M*y*r himself, and having carefully removed some outlying portions of butter which still adhered to the membrane, I bore it tenderly towards the Second Court.