As a poet Sir Henry Wotton is universally known by one exquisite little poem, The Character of a Happy Life, which is in all hymn-books. The general drift of his poetry is, to expose the hollowness of all the objects to which as a statesman and courtier the greater portion of his own life was devoted. His verses are texts for discourses, uniting economy of words with fulness of thought and sentiment. His celebrated epitaph on a married couple is condensed to the point of converting feeling into wit.

"He first deceased. She, for a little, tried

To do without him, liked it not, and died."

In one of his hymns he has this startling image:

"No hallowed oils, no gums I need,

No new-born drams of purging fire;

One rosy drop from David's seed

Was worlds of seas to quench their ire."

Excellent, however, of its kind as Wotton's poetry is, it is not equal to that living poem, his life. He was one of those men who are not so much makers of poems as subjects for poems.

The last poet of whom we shall speak, George Herbert, was one in whom the quaintness of the time found its most fantastic embodiment. He began life as a courtier; and on the disappointment of his hopes, or on his

conviction of the vanity of his ambitions, he suddenly changed his whole course of thought and life, became a clergyman, and is known to posterity only as "holy George Herbert." His poetry is the bizarre expression of a deeply religious and intensely thoughtful nature, sincere at heart, but strange, far-fetched, and serenely crotchety in utterance. Nothing can be more frigid than the conceits in which he clothes the great majority of his pious ejaculations and heavenly ecstasies. Yet every reader feels that his fancy, quaint as it often is, is a part of the organism of his character; and that his quaintness, his uncouth metaphors and comparisons, his squalid phraseology, his holy charades and pious riddles, his inspirations crystallized into ingenuities, and his general disposition to represent the divine through the exterior guise of the odd, are vitally connected with that essential beauty and sweetness of soul which give his poems their wild flavor and fragrance. Amateurs in sanctity, and men of fine religious taste, will tell you that genuine emotion can never find an outlet in such an elaborately fantastic form; and the proposition, according, as it does, with the rules of Blair and Kames and Whately, commands your immediate assent; but still you feel that genuine emotion is there, and, if you watch sharply, you will find that Taste, entering holy George Herbert's "Temple," after a preliminary sniff

of imbecile contempt, somehow slinks away abashed after the first verse at the " Church-porch :"

"Thou whose sweet youth and early hopes enhance
Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure,
Hearken unto a verser, who may chance

Rhyme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure:
A verse may find him whom a sermon flies,

And turn delight into a sacrifice."

And that fine gentleman, Taste, having relieved us of his sweetly-scented presence, redolent with the "balm of a thousand flowers," let us, in closing, quote one

of the profoundest utterances of the Elizabethan age, George Herbert's lines on Man :

"Man is all symmetrie,

Full of proportions, one limbe to another,

And all to all the world besides:

Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amitie,

And both with moon and tides.

"Nothing hath got so farre

But man hath caught and kept it, as his prey.

His eyes dismount the highest starre:

He is in little all the sphere.

Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they

Finde their acquaintance there.

"The starres have us to bed;

Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws:

Musick and light attend our head.

All things unto our flesh are kinde

In their descent and being; to our minde
In their ascent and cause.

"More servants wait on Man

Than he'll take notice of; in every path

He treads down that which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.

O mightie love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.

"Since then, my God, thou hast So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it, That it may dwell with thee at last!

Till then afford us so much wit,

That as the world serves us we may serve thee,
And both thy servants be."

11*

SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.

HE characteristic of a good prose style is, that,

THE

while it mirrors or embodies the mind that uses it, it also gives pleasure in itself. The quality which decides on its fulfilment of these conditions is commonly called taste.

Though taste is properly under law, and should, if pressed, give reasons for its decisions, many of its most authoritative judgments come directly from its instinct or insight, without regard to rules. Indeed, a fine feeling of the beauty, melody, fitness, and vitality of words is often wanting in men who are dexterous in the application of the principles of style; and some of the most philosophic treatises on æsthetics betray a lack of that deep internal sense which directly perceives the objects and qualities whose validity it is the office of the understanding laboriously to demonstrate.

But whether we judge of style by our perceptions or by principles, we all feel that there is a distinction between persons who write books and writers whose books belong to literature. There is something in the mere