Lovell (1846) and Henry Fortescue (1847). His plots, everything considered, are fairly natural and his characters are well sustained. On the whole, without a spark of genius, he occupies a prominent place in the undistinguished theatrical record of his time.

LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON, better known as L. E. L. (18021838), wrote a great deal of gushing and harmlessly Byronic poetry, which, as the work of a romantic and unfortunate lady, enjoyed a great and undeserved popularity. She was the daughter of an army agent, was born at Chelsea, and married, in 1838, Mr. Maclean, governor of the Gold Coast in West Africa. She went out with him to Cape Coast Castle, and accidentally poisoned herself there two months after landing.

JOHN LEYDEN (1775-1811) was the author of certain Poetical Remains, published in 1819, under the editorship of the Rev. James Morton. Sir Walter Scott was his friend and spoke in high terms of his poetry. Leyden had written for The Edinburgh Magazine, and in 1798 became a Presbyterian preacher; but subsequently he entered the East India Company's service as a surgeon. A man of great learning, he mastered several Oriental languages while in India. He accompanied Lord Minto in the expedition against Java, and died there in 1811.

JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN (1803-1849) was an Irish poet whose life was irregular and unhappy. His poetry was eminently patriotic, and had besides a curiously mystic and religious flavour which has fascinated many critics-and especially Celtic critics of recent years. As to the noble and unusual lyric of Dark Rosaleen-a strange personification of Ireland-there cannot be two opinions. Mangan had, however, very little control of metrical form, and, even at his best, could produce distressingly bad lines.

JAMES MONTGOMERY (1771-1854), the Moravian editor of the Sheffield Iris, and in every way an excellent man, wrote during his lifetime a very large amount of melodious

verse which is almost poetry. His books have exotic and strange titles -The West Indies (1809), which dealt with the abolition of the slave trade; The World before the Flood (1812), a prehistoric epic; Greenland (1819); and The Pelican Island (1826). Montgomery's philanthropy and liberalism brought him into hot water, and, in his early manhood, he was twice imprisoned for libel. He was a sound if not very original critic, and his lectures on poetry at the Royal Institution (1830-1) were successful. In 1835 he received a pension of £150 from Peel. Perhaps his chief claim to distinction resides in some of his beautiful hymns, published in 1853. Of these one or two, including For ever with the Lord, are classic. He must be carefully distinguished from the unspeakable ROBERT MONTGOMERY (1807-1855), whose trash in The Omnipresence of the Deity (1828) and Satan (1830) gained a notorious immortality in the scathing criticism written by Macaulay for the Edinburgh. Montgomery took Holy Orders, and was minister, during the last twelve years of his life, of a proprietary chapel in St. Pancras.

WILLIAM MOTHERWELL (17971835) was a Scotsman who made some mark in journalism, wrote some Scottish songs, and took an interest in old legends and ballads. Unlike his contemporaries, Tannahill and Thom, his work is not wholly derivative from Burns; and the best part of it has a close kinship to Scott's work in the ballad and popular tale.

JOHN O'KEEFFE (1747-1833) really belongs, as a dramatist and writer of songs, to the age of Sheridan and Cumberland. He was an Irishman, was born at Dublin, and died at Southampton. His whole life was prolific in farces and operettas, and he had a genuine, although rather coarse, comic touch. Several of his songs, such as The Thorn, that very shallow and inane lyric, and the Bacchic invocation, Flow thou regal purple stream, are distantly remembered by the compilers of song-books, but their position in such miscellanies is merely perfunctory and traditional,

ROBERT POLLOK (1798-1827), a native of North Moorhouse in Renfrewshire, a student of Glasgow, and a minister of the United Secession Church, wrote a somewhat bombastic poem on Calvinistic lines, which he called The Course of Time (1827), and, in prose, Tales of the Covenanters (1824-5). Admirers consider The Course of Time Miltonic, and it certainly has some grandeur; but most readers will prefer Milton undiluted by Pollok.

BRYAN WALLER PROCTER, better known as BARRY CORNWALL (17871874), was a very amiable and sociable man, a member of the "Cockney school," and a fluent verse writer. He was the friend of Leigh Hunt and Lamb; he was the recipient of a tribute from Thackeray in the dedication of Vanity Fair, and lived to win the affection of Mr. Swinburne. Otherwise he was a London solicitor, and for many years a Commissioner in Lunacy. His education was received at Harrow, and in his edition (1838) of Ben Jonson-the only edition which for many years commanded a popular price-he approved himself a scholar.

His

Dramatic Scenes (1819) and The Flood in Thessaly (1823) were not very brilliant, but his English Songs (1832) won him some fame. These, however, have a very distant cousinship to poetry; and The Sea! the Sea! the open Sea!-written by a notoriously bad sailor-as a typical specimen, bears out this assertion. It must be owned that the regard of his brother-poets and men of letters for the sincere and upright Procter as a man tinged their criticism of his

verse.

It seems illiberal to leave the name of HENRY JAMES PYE (1745-1813), Poet Laureate for twenty-three years, without some mention. However, if any writer of verse could be more colourless than Hayley and more imbecile than Robert Merry, the notorious "Della Crusca," it was this hopeless poetaster. The list or laureates provokes some amusement in the most reverent breast; but, compared with Pye, Tate, Eusden, and even Whitehead, rise to Olympic heights. Byron's lines in The Vision

of Judgment, where George III's ghost exclaims

"What, what! Pye come again? No more, no more of that!'

contain a pregnant and immortal criticism.

WILLIAM STEWART ROSE (17751843) was celebrated as a translator. His verse translation of the first three books of Amadis de Gaul ap peared in 1803, the year of Southey's prose version of the same romance, and from 1823 to 1831 he published his well-known translation of the Orlando Furioso.

JAMES SMITH (1775-1839), known best in connection with his brother HORACE SMITH (1779-1849), wrote clever parodies and criticisms in The Picnic, The London Review, and The Monthly Mirror. In the last appeared those joint imitations of Horace by the brothers which were published in 1813 as Horace in London. In 1812, at the opening of the new Drury Lane Theatre, they published their volume of Rejected Addresses-one of the best collections of parodies that has ever appeared. James wrote the imitations of Wordsworth, Cobbett, Southey, Coleridge, and Crabbe; Horace, those of Byron, Scott, Moore, 'Monk" Lewis, Fitzgerald, and Dr. Johnson. James did little more in the way of literature beyond an occasional piece in some of the monthlies. Lady Blessington said that "if James Smith had not been a wealthy man he would have been a great man. Horace wrote far more voluminously than his brother, attempting novels and verses. Brambletye House (1826) was in imitation of Scott; and, beside this, he wrote The Tor Hill (1826), Walter Colyton (1830), The Moneyed Man (1841), and several others. Some parts of his poem, An Address to the Mummy, show excellent poetic

taste.

WILLIAM SOTHEBY (1757-1833). born in London and educated at Harrow, was for some time in the army, but retired in 1780 and devoted himself to literature. He was a man of great learning and translated with much elegance and skill. His chief

works were: a Poetical Description | of Wales (1790), a Translation of Virgil's Georgics (1800), Constance de Castille (1810), written after the style of Scott's romantic poems, translations of the Iliad (1831) and the Odyssey (1832). He also published a creditable translation of Wieland's Oberon (1798).

SIR THOMAS NOON TALFOURD (1795-1854) was born at Reading, rose to distinction at the bar, and was made a judge in 1849. He died on the bench while addressing the Grand Jury at Stafford in 1854. He wrote the tragedies of Ion (1836), The Athenian Captive (1838), Glencoe (1840), and The Castilian (1853); while in prose his works include the Memorials (1837-48) of his friend Charles Lamb, Vacation Rambles (1845), and an Essay on the Greek Drama. He is best known by the tragedy of Ion, a very striking closetdrama; and it will be remembered that it was to him that Dickens inscribed Pickwick and Browning dedicated Pippa Passes.

ROBERT TANNAHILL (1774-1810) is one of the Scottish bards who inherited something of Burns' genius in song-writing. He was a weaver, had a somewhat unhappy life, and drowned himself at Paisley. lyrics, the one beginning "Keen blaws the wind ower the braes of Gleniffer," is a good specimen.

Of his

The literary society of Norwich, in many ways the most intellectually remarkable of our provincial towns, is represented by WILLIAM TAYLOR (1765-1836), who translated some of the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, and gave a great impulse to the study of German literature in England.

WILLIAM TENNANT (1784-1848) was a Fifeshire schoolmaster who became a professor at St. Andrews. In 1812 he published a clever mockheroic poem in ottava rima, called Anster (i.e. Anstruther) Fair, which is curious, not merely on account of its humour, but as offering an example of a style and manner anticipating, if not suggesting, those of the more celebrated Whistlecrafts (see above, in connection with John H. Frere). If it really suggested this

production, Tennant may be regarded as the literary grandparent of Beppo and Don Juan.

WILLIAM THOM (1798?-1848) belonged to this generation of Scotch songsters, and was the author of some charming lyrics. Like Tannahill, he was a weaver by trade.

MARY TIGHE (1772-1810), born in the county of Wicklow, wrote a poem called Psyche (1805), which was founded on the famous story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. Mrs. Tighe showed some imagination and graceful fancy. :

SIR AUBREY HUNT DE VERE (1788-1846) was an Irish country gentleman of county Limerick, who changed his name from Hunt to De Vere in 1832. He became a friend and correspondent of Wordsworth, who generously called his Sonnets "the most perfect of our age." His dramatic poem Julian the Apostate (1822), and his regular drama, Mary Tudor (1847), are also to be had in remembrance. He is not, of course, to be confused with his son and namesake, the author of the Legends of St. Patrick.

An exaggerated fame used to be attached to the poems of HENRY KIRKE WHITE (1785-1806), the son of a Nottingham butcher, who showed some precocity in versemaking and attracted Southey's attention. He was deeply moved by the Evangelical revival in the Church of England, and, making the acquaintance of Charles Simeon, the famous fellow of King's, gained, through his influence, a sizarship at St. John's College, Cambridge. He intended to take Holy Orders, and showed great promise; but on October 19, 1806, he died in his college rooms. Southey published his Remains (1807) with a memoir. His pathetic history added to the supposed merit of his poetry, and even Byron, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, made him a favourable exception from the general blame. This was probably due to a tenderness for him as a Nottinghamshire man. White's longest poem was the descriptive piece called Clifton Grove (1803). The character of his verse, if smooth and melo

dious, is fatally mawkish; and, as a rule, his lines have a frigid, manneristic turn which reminds one of the utterly uninspired poetry of the Brontës.

CHARLES WOLFE (1791-1823), an Irishman and a clergyman, was a man of one poem. His Remains were collected and published in 1825, but

his one claim to celebrity is the fine Burial of Sir John Moore (1817).

FRANCIS WRANGHAM (1769-1842). Archdeacon of Cleveland and afterwards of the East Riding, was the author of some translations from the classical poets and of other writings in verse and prose which are often quoted by writers of his own day.