grateful for eternally. Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy. There' in their habit as they lived' they dance in round, they fill their laps with flowers, they frolic and junket sweetly, they go for ever maying. Soft winds blow round them, and in their clear young voices they sing the verse of the rare artist who called them from the multitude and set them for ever where they are.

A

ND Amaryllis herself will not, mayhap, be found so fair as those younglings of the year she bears with her in 'wicker ark' or 'lawny continent.' Herrick is preeminently the poet of flowers. were capable of bringing back

'Le bouquet d'Ophélie

He alone

De la rive inconnue où les flots l'ont laissé.

He knows and loves the dear blossoms all.
He considers them with tender and shining
eyes,
he calls them his sweetest fancies and
his fondest metaphors. Their idea is in-
separable from that of his girls themselves,
and it is by the means of the one set of
mistresses that he is able so well to under-

His

Moral.

His Piety.

In an

stand the other. The flowers are maids to
him, and the maids are flowers.
ecstasy of tender contemplation he turns
from those to these, exampling Julia from
the rose and pitying the hapless violets as
though they were indeed not blooms insensi-
tive but actually 'poor girls neglected.' His
pages breathe their clean and innocent per-
fumes, and are beautiful with the chaste
beauty of their colour, just as they carry
with them something of the sweetness and
simplicity of maidenhood itself. And from
both he extracts the same pathetic little
moral: both are lovely and both must die.
And so, between his virgins that are for love
indeed and those that sit silent and delicious
in the flowery nunnery,' the old singer
finds life so good a thing that he dreads to
lose it, and not all his piety can remove the
passionate regret with which he sees things
hastening to their end.

THA

HAT piety is equally removed from the erotic mysticism of Richard Crashaw and from the adoration, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper. To find an analogue, you have to cross the borders of

English into Spain. In his Noble Numbers Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such men as Valdivielso, Ocaña, Lope de Ubeda; and there are versicles of his that in their homely mixture of the sacred and the profane, in their reverent familiarity with things divine, their pious and simple gallantry, may well be likened to the graceful and charming romances and villancicos of these strangers. Their spirit is less Protestant than Catholic, and is hardly English at all, so that it is scarce to be wondered at if they have remained unpopular. But their sincerity and earnestness are as far beyond doubt as their grace of line and inimitable daintiness of surface.

His Qualities.

MR

LOCKER

R. LOCKER'S verse has charmed so wisely and so long that it has travelled the full circle of compliment and exhausted one part of the lexicon of eulogy. As you turn his pages you feel as freshly as ever the sweet, old-world elegance, the courtly amiability, the mannerly restraint, the measured and accomplished ease. True, they are colourless, and in these days we are deboshed with colour; but then they are so luminously limpid and serene, they are so sprightly and graceful and gay! In the gallantry they affect there is a something at once exquisite and paternal. If they pun, 'tis with an air even thus might Chesterfield have stooped to folly. And then, how clean the English, how light yet vigorous the touch, the manner how elegant and how staid! There is wit in them, and that so genial and unassuming that as like as not it gets leave to beam on unperceived.

There is humour too, but humour so polite as to look half-unconscious, so dandified that it leaves you in doubt as to whether you should laugh or only smile. And withal there is a vein of well-bred wisdom never breathed but to the delight no less than to the profit of the student. And for those of them that are touched with passion, as in The Unrealized Ideal and that lovely odelet to Mabel's pearls, why, these are, I think, the best and the least approachable of all.

FOR

OR as English as she is, indeed, his His Effect. muse is not to be touched off save in

French.

To think of her is to reflect that she is délicate, spirituelle, semillante—une fine mouche, allez! The salon has disappeared,—' Iran, indeed, is gone, and all his rose'; but she was born with the trick of it. You make your bow to her in her Sheraton chair, a buckle shoe engagingly discovered; and she rallies you with an incomparable ease, a delicate malice, in a dialect itself a distinction; and when she smiles it is behind or above a fan that points while it dissembles, that assists effect as delightfully as it veils intention. At times