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singular charm of manner, and perhaps of character, gave a permanency to his social success by converting the admirers of an evening into friends for ife. With all these genial triumphs, however, we cannot look over the little volume of graceful verse which is all that now remains of so splendid a reputation, without feeling that the author was born for better, higher, more enduring purposes; that the charming trifler, whose verses forty years ago every lady knew by heart, and which are now well nigh forgotten, ought not to have wasted his high endowments in wreathing garlands for festivals - ought not, above all, to have gone on from youth to age, leading the melancholy life which is all holiday.

Nevertheless we must accept these verses for such as they are, just as we admire unquestioning the wing of a butterfly, or the petal of a flower; and in their kind they are exquisite. Look at the fancy and the finish of these stanzas !

TO THE LADY ANNE HAMILTON.*

Too late I staid, forgive the crime,
Unheeded flew the hours;

How noiseless falls the foot of Time

That only treads on flowers!

* Very sweetly mated with one of the sweetest old Irish

airs, "The Yellow Horse."

What eye with clear account remarks
The ebbing of his glass,

When all its sands are diamond sparks
That dazzle as they pass?

Ah! who to sober measurement
Time's happy swiftness brings,
When birds of Paradise have lent

Their plumage for his wings?

In the next extract there is an unexpected touch of sentiment mixed with its playfulness that is singularly captivating.

GOOD-BYE AND HOW-D'-YE DO.

One day Good-bye met How-d'-ye-do,
Too close to shun saluting,

But soon the rival sisters flew

From kissing to disputing.

"Away," says How-d'-ye-do; "your mien

Appals my cheerful nature,
No name so sad as yours is seen
In sorrow's nomenclature.

"Whene'er I give one sunshine hour,
Your cloud comes o'er to shade it :
Where'er I plant one bosom flower,
Your mildew drops to fade it.

Ere How-d'-ye-do has tuned each tongue
To Hope's delightful measure,

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Good-bye replied, "Your statement's true, And well your cause you've pleaded; pray who'd think of How-d'-ye-do, Unless Good-bye preceded?

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Without my prior influence,

Could yours have ever flourish'd?

And can your hand one flower dispense, But those my tears have nourish'd?

"How oft, if at the court of Love
Concealment be the fashion,
When How-d'-ye-do has fail'd to move,

Good-bye reveals the passion!

"How oft, when Cupid's fires decline,

As every

heart remembers,

One sigh of mine, and only mine,

Revives the dying embers!

"Go, bid the timid lover choose,
And I'll resign my charter,
If he for ten kind How-d'-ye-does
One kind Good-bye would barter!

"From love and friendship's kindred source
We both derive existence,

And they would both lose half their force,
Without our joint assistance.

""Tis well the world our merit knows,
Since time, there's no denying,.
One half in How-d'-ye-doing goes,
And t' other in Good-byeing!"

Nobody has told the tragedy of Beth-Gelert so well as Mr. Spencer, in his simple but elegant ballad. I do not know if many persons partake my feeling respecting those stories of which the animal world are the heroes, but to me they seem more touching than grander histories of men and women. Dumb creatures—to use that phrase of the common people, which makes in its two homely words so true an appeal to our protection, and our pity-dumb creatures are in their love so faithful, so patient in their sufferings, so submissive under wrong, so powerless for remonstrance or for redress, that we take their part against the human brutes, their oppressors, as naturally and almost as vehemently as we do that of Philoctetes against Ulysses, or of Lear against Goneril. I am not sure that I do not carry my sympathy still farther. In the famous story of the Falcon, for instance, in Boccaccio, where a lover, ruined by the charges to which he puts himself in courting an ungrateful mistress, and owing

his

very existence to the game struck down for him by a favourite hawk, kills the poor bird to furnish forth a dinner for the haughty beauty when she at last comes to visit him, I never could help thinking that the enamoured cavalier made a very bad exchange when he lost the falcon, and won the lady. His conscience must have pricked him all his life. He had not even, so far as we hear, the consolation, such as it is, of erecting a monument to the memory of his murdered favourite, on which, like Llewelyn, to "hang his horn and spear."

BETH-GELERT; OR, THE GRAVE OF THE GREYHOUND.

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'Twas only at Llewelyn's board

The faithful Gelert fed;

He watched, he served, he cheered his lord,
And sentinelled his bed.

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