praise than to use my endeavors, I have hitherto bridled my desire to see them by the care and jealousy of their safety; and banished myself from the scene of my cradle in my own country. I have lived like a foreigner, finding among strangers that which, in my nearest blood, I presumed not to seek." Then, regretting that he has been barred from affording to his dearest friends that which hath been eagerly sought and beneficially attained by mere strangers, he exclaims passionately: "Who hath more interest in the grape than he who planted the vine? Who more right to the crop than he who sowed the corn? or where can the child owe so great service as to him to whom he is indebted for his very life and being? With young Tobias I have travelled far, and brought home a freight of spiritual sustenance to enrich you, and medicinable receipts against your ghostly maladies. I have with Esau, after long toil in pursuing a long and painful chase, returned with the full prey you were wont to love, desiring thereby to ensure your blessing. I have, in this general famine of all true and Christian food, with Joseph prepared abundance of the mead of angels for the repast of your soul. And now my desire is that my drugs may cure you, my prey delight you, and my provisions feed you, by whom I have been cured, enlightened, and fed myself; that your courtesies may, in part, be counterveiled, and my duty, in some sort, performed. 46 Despise not, good sire, the youth of your son, neither deem your God measureth his endowments by number of years. Hoary senses are often couched under youthful locks, and some are riper in the spring than others in the autumn of their age. God chose not Esau himself, nor his eldest son, but young David, to conquer Goliath and to rule his people; not the most aged person, but David, the most innocent youth, delivered Susannah from the iniquity of the judges. Christ, at twelve years of age, was found in the temple questioning with the greatest doctors. A true Elias can conceive that a little cloud may cast a large and abundant shower; and the Scripture teacheth us that God unveileth to little ones that which he concealeth from the wisest sages. His truth is not abashed by the minority of the speaker; for out of the mouths of infants and sucklings he can perfect his praises. The full of your spring-tide is now fallen, and the stream of your life waneth to a low ebb; your tired bark beginneth to leak, and grateth oft upon the gravel of the grave; therefore it is high time for you to strike sail and put into harbor, lest, remaining in the scope of the winds and waves of this wicked time, some unexpected gust should dash you upon the rock of eternal ruin." The entire letter is given in both Walter and Turnbull's Memoirs of Southwell, and has been extravagantly praised as being the composition of Sir Walter Raleigh, among whose Remains it is frequently reprinted. Mr. Grosart, a Protestant clergyman, says of it: "I know nothing comparable with the mingled affection and prophetlike fidelity, the wise instruction, correction, reproof, the full rich Scripturalness and quaint applications, the devoutness, the insistence, the pathos of this letter." The edition of Sir Walter Raleigh's Remains, published in London in 1675, was the subject of an article in the Retrospective Review for 1820, in which the reviewer remarks: "The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Ag、ủ Father' is supposed to be a libel on Sir Walter, written by his enemies. It will be seen, however, that it bears a strong resemblance to his style, although the metaphor is more profuse and ornamental, and seems to be rather engrafted on his thoughts than to spring up with them. That this piece should be dictated by personal hostility is strange. It contains exhortations that might with the greatest propriety be directed to any man. "It is possible that it might be written by another in imitation of Sir Walter Raleigh's Advice to his Son'; yet if he was an enemy, he was of a most uncommon description. As the advice, however, is worth quoting for its own merit, and is written with great force and beauty, we shall give our readers an opportunity of judging for themselves." This letter is Southwell's earliest dated prose, and was followed by a variety of treatises, epistles, and pamphlets, printed on the "private press" at his own house in London. Besides these, there remain several English and a large number of Latin prose writings still in manuscript. "Mary Magdalene's Funerall Teares," although prose in form, is in fact far more fervid and impassioned than the greater part of his poetry. SOUTHWELL'S POETRY. largely read by the generation that immediately succeeded him. Many years ago, Ellis said: "The very few copies of his works which are now known to exist are the remnant of at least seventeen different editions, of which eleven were printed between 1593 and 1600"; and at a later period, Drake, in his Shakespeare and his Times, says: "Both the poetry and the prose of Southwell possess the most decided merit; the former, which is almost entirely restricted to moral and religious subjects, flows in a vein of great harmony, perspicuity, and elegance, and breathes a fascination resulting from the subject and the pathetic mode of treating it which fixes and deeply interests the reader." 6 To the readers of poetry for its merely sensuous qualities of flowing measure, attractive imagery, and brilliant description, the poems of Southwell possess but few attractions. Their subjects are all religious, or, at least, serious; and, in reading him, we must totally forget the traditional pagan poet pictured to us as crowned with flowers, and holding in hand an overflowing anacreontic cup. Serious, indeed, his poems might well be, for they were all composed during the tervals of thirteen bodily rackings in a gloomy prison that opened only upon the scaffold. And yet we look in vain among them for expressions Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made A valuable tribute of admiration to Southwell's poetic talent is that of Ben Jonson, who said: "that Southwell was hanged; yet so he (Jonson) had written that piece of his, The Burning Babe,' he would have been content to destroy many of his." Our readers, we are sure, will thank us for giving it here, although we strongly suspect that Mr. Grosart will not approve of its modern orthography. of the reproaches or repining such a fate might well engender, and we search with but scant result for record or trace of his own sufferings in the lines traced with fingers yet bent and As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow, my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed; smarting with the rack. The vanity Alas! quoth he, but newly born, in fiery heats of all earthly things, the trials of life, the folly and wickedness of the world, the uncertainty of life, and the consolations and glories of religion, are the constantly returning subjects of his productions, and, however treated, they always reflect the benignity and elevation of the poet's character. Certain it is that Southwell was I frye, Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I! My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scornes; Specimens of the Early English Poets, first edition, vol. ii. p. 166. + Vol. i. p. 644, fourth edition. Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, p. 13. The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals, The metal in this furnace wrought are men's de filed souls, For which, as now, on fire I am, to work them to their good, So will I melt into a bath to washe them in my blood: and 'feeling' that are as musical as Apollo's lute, and as fresh as a spring budding spray; and the wording of all (excepting over-alliteration and inversion occasionally, is throughout With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly of the 'pure well of English unde shrunk away, And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day. Our limits will permit but slight citation from the body of Southwell's noetry. He is most widely known by his chief poem "S. Peter's Complaint," consisting of one hundred and thirty-six stanzas (six-line). But his most attractive pieces are his shorter poems-"Times go by Turns,"" Content and Rich,"*"Life is but Loss," "Look Home," "Love's servile Lot," and the whole series on our Saviour and his Mother; and, making some allowance for the enthusiasm of our editor, no true lover of poetry who reads these productions of Southwell will seriously dissent from Mr. Grosart's estimate of them. "The hastiest reader will come on 'thinking' Here are seven of its seventeen stanzas: . filed.' When you take some of the Myrtæ and Mæoniæ pieces, and read and re-read them, you are struck with their condensation, their concinnity, their polish, their élan, their memorableness. Holiness is in them not as scent on love-locks, but as fragrance in the great Gardener's flowers of fragrance. His tears are pure and white as the dew of the morning.' His smiles-for he has humor, even wit, that must have lurked in the burdened eyes and corners o' mouth-are sunny as sunshine. As a whole, his poetry is healthy and strong, and, I think, has been more potential in our literature than appears on the surface. I do not think it would be hard to show that others of whom more is heard drew light from him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to Thomas Hood. For example, limiting as to the latter, I believe every reader who will compare the two deliberately will see in the Vale of Tears' the source of the latter's immortal 'Haunted House '-dim, faint, weak beside it, as the earth-hid bulb compared with the lovely blossom of hyacinth or tulip or lily, nevertheless really carrying in it the original of the mightier after-poem." Our warmest tribute of praise can render but scant justice to the intelligence, the industry, the erudition, the keen poetic sense, and the enthusiasm which the editor of the volume before us has devoted to what has evidently been to him a labor of love. Mr. Grosart is well known in the literary world as the editor of Crashawe and of Vaughan, as also of the forthcoming editions of Marvell, Donne, and Sidney. His laboriously corrected version of our martyr-poet's legacy has, it may be said, restored Southwell to us, so obscured had he become by mistakes, misprints, and false readings. Indeed Mr. Grosart's somewhat jealous love of his subject betrays him into apparently harsh judgment on the efforts of others, when, for instance, he declares himself" vexed by the travesties on editing and mere carelessness of Walter earlier (1817) and Turnbull later (1856) in their so-called editions of the poems of Father Southwell," adding: "Turnbull said contemptuously, I refrain from criticism on Mr. Walter's text '-severe but not undeserved, only his own is scarcely one whit better, and in places worse." There is one passage at the close of Mr. Grosart's interesting preface which has a special interest for us as Americans. We mean his reference to the verdict pronounced on Father Southwell's poetry by Prof. James Russell Lowell in his charming book My Study Windows. "It seems to me," says Mr. Grosart, "harsh to brutality on the man (meet follower of him the first true gentleman that ever breathed'); while on the poetry it rests on self-evidently the most superficial acquaintance and the hastiest generalization. To pronounce S. Peter's Complaint' a 'drawl' of thirty pages of 'maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a (sic) sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus,' shows about as much knowledge-that is, ignorance of the poem as of the schoolman, and as another remark does of S. Peter; for, with admitted tedium, S. Peter's complaint sounds depths of penitence and remorse, and utters out emotion that flames into passion very unforgettably, while there are felicities of metaphor, daintinesses of word-painting, brilliancies of innerportraiture, scarcely to be matched in The 'paracontemporary verse. phrase' of David (to wit, 'David's Peccavi') is a single short piece, and the 'punning' conceit, 'fears are my feres,' is common to some of England's finest wits, and in the meaning of 'fere not at all to be pronounced against. If we on this side of the Atlantic valued less the opinion of such a unique genius as Prof. Lowell's, if we did not take him to our innermost love, we should less grieve over such a vulgar affront offered to a venerable name as his whole paragraph to Southwell. I shall indulge the hope of our edition reaching the 'Study,' and persuading to a real study' of these poems, and, if so, I do not despair of a voluntary reversal of the first judgment. ARIS WILMOTT pronounced Southwell to be the Goldsmith of our early poets; and 'Content and Rich,' and, Dyer's phansie turned to a Sinner's Complaint' But bewarrant the great praise. neath the manner recalling Goldsmith, there is a purity and richness of thought, a naturalness, a fineness of expression, a harmony of versification, and occasionally a tide-flow of high-toned feeling, not to be met with in him. "Nor will Prof. Lowell deem his (I fear) hasty (mis)judgment's reconsideration too much to count on, after the present Archbishop of Dublin's well-weighed words in his notes to his Household Book of English Poetry (1868): "Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised at least as much as he deserves. This may be so; yet, taking into account the finished beauty of such poems as this ("Lewd Love is Loss") and No. 2 (" Times go by Turns") of this collection, poems which, as far as they go, leave nothing to be desired, he has scarcely been praised more than he leserves. How in earlier times he was rated, the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems will sufficiently testify; though probably the creed be professed, and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this. Robert Southwell was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of the sovereign and the life of the state must altogether fail to justify or excuse' (pp. 391-392). "To Archbishop Trench's I add, as equally weighty and worthy, the fine and finely sympathetic yet discriminative judgment of Dr. George Macdonald in Antiphon as follows: "I proceed to call up one WHO WAS A POET INDEED, although little known as such, being a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit even, and therefore, in Elizabeth's reign, a traitor and subject to the penalties according (accruing)? Robert Southwell, thirteen times most cruelly tortured, could "not be induced to confess anything, not even the color of the horse whereon he rode on a certain day, lest from such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in company of what Catholics, he that day was,' etc. "I believe, then," concludes Dr. Grosart, "I shall not appeal in vain to Prof. Lowell to give a few hours behind his 'Study Windows' to a reperusal of some of the poems of Southwell named by us and these sufficiently qualified critics." SOMETHING ABOUT LACE. THERE is probably no article, not a necessity, which has employed so many heads and hands, and been the subject of such varied interests, as lace. The making of it has given employment to countless nunneries, where the ladies, working first and most heartily for the church, have also taught this art to their pupils as an accomplishment or a means of support. It was, indeed, so peculiarly the province of the religious that, long after it was done in the world, it still bore the name of "nun's-work." In those old days when railroads were not, and when swamps and forests covered tracts of land now thick with villages and cities, country ladies made fine needle-work their chief occupation; and it was the custom in feudal times for the squires' daughters to spend some time in the castle, in attendance on the châtelaine, where they learned to embroider and make lace. It was then a woman's only resource, and was held in high esteem. In the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, one Catherine Sloper was laid to rest, in 1620, with the inscription on her tombstone that she was 66 exquisite at her needle." Millions of poor women, and even men and children, have earned their bread by this delicate labor; women of intelligence and fair estate have devoted their lives to it; and noble and regal ladies have been proud to excel in the art. It is related that when Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio went down to the palace at Bridewell to seek an interview with the repudiated wife of Henry VIII., they found her seated |