patron through life-the mild Askew, with longing aspirations leaned foremost from his venerable Æsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered.

C. Lamb.

Dirge

(From Sylvia)

WAIL!

AIL! wail ye o'er the dead!
Wail! wail ye o'er her!

Youth's ta'en and Beauty's fled :
O then deplore her!

Strew! strew ye, maidens strew

Sweet flowers and fairest,

Pale rose and pansy blue,

Lily the rarest!

Lay, lay her gently down

On her moss pillow,

While we our foreheads crown

With the sad willow!

Raise, raise the song of woe,

Youths, to her honour!

Fresh leaves and blossoms throw,

Virgins upon her.

Round, round the cypress bier,
Where she lies sleeping,

On every turf a tear,

Let us go weeping.

Wail! wail ye o'er the dead!

Wail! wail ye o'er her!

Youth's ta'en and Beauty's fled;

O then deplore her!

Epitaph on a Jacobite

G. Darley.

To my true king I offered free from stain

Courage and faith: vain faith and courage vain.
For him I threw lands, honours, wealth, away
And one dear hope that was more prized than they.
For him I languished in a foreign clime,
Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood's prime ;
Heard on La Vernia Scargill's whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting place I asked, an early grave.

Oh thou, whom chance leads to this nameless stone,
From that proud country which was once mine own,
By those white cliffs I never more must see,
By that dear language which I spake like thee,
Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.
Lord Macaulay.

THE

The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn :

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;

A new Peneus rolls its fountains
Against the morning star.

Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,

And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.

O write no more the tale of Troy,
If Earth Death's scroll must be !
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free:

Although a subtler sphinx renew

Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;

And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued :

Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.

O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.

The world is weary of the past,

O might it die or rest at last!

P. B. Shelley.

Dirge for the Year

ORP

RPHAN hours, the year is dead,
Come and sigh, come and weep!

Merry hours, smile instead,

For the year is but asleep :
See, it smiles as it is sleeping,
Mocking your untimely weeping.

As an earthquake rocks a corse
In its coffin in the clay,

So White Winter, that rough nurse,
Rocks the dead cold year to-day:
Solemn hours! wail aloud
For your mother in her shroud.

As the wild air stirs and sways
The tree-swung cradle of a child,
So the breath of these rude days
Rocks the year :-be calm and mild,
Trembling hours; she will arise
With new love within her eyes.

January grey is here,

Like a sexton by her grave;

February bears the bier,

March with grief doth howl and rave,

And April weeps-but, O ye hours!

Follow with May's fairest flowers.

P. B. Shelley.

Essay cclxvi.

(From The Tatler)

IT

T would be a good Appendix to The Art of Living and Dying, if any one would write The Art of Growing Old, and teach men to resign their pretensions to the pleasures and gallantries of youth, in proportion to the alteration they find in themselves by the approach of age and infirmities. The infirmities of this stage of life would be much