the subject and design of every one of his effusions make it evident that it is amongst the religious poets, if in the poetic brotherhood at all, that Southwell's place must be; but we confess that, amidst abundant evidence of the sincerity and ardour of his own personal religion, and of the earnestness of his anxiety to kindle piety in other hearts, we do not meet with any striking or sufficient instance of his mastery of the poet's art, or, indeed, with any rendering of his thoughts in which religion does not seem, in its poetical aspect at least, to have lost something of its simplicity and beauty by his efforts to embellish it. His compositions, as it seems to us, belong to that class of which it has been said by a gifted brother of the guild, that they may "keep alive devotion already kindled; but they leave no trace in the memory, make no impression on the heart, and fall through the mind as sounds glide through the ear,—pleasant, it may be, in their passage, but never returning to haunt the imagination in retirement, or, in the multitude of the thoughts, to refresh the soul."

Southwell's shorter pieces are undoubtedly his best. Mr. Hallam briefly dismisses his longest poem as "wordy and tedious;" and those who read the "Saint Peter's Complaint" will pretty certainly coincide in opinion with that distinguished critic. One of the best stanzas in it, both for substance and for form, is the following :

"Christ! health of fever'd soul, heaven of the mind,

Force of the feeble, nurse of infant loves,

Guide to the wandering foot, light to the blind,
Whom weeping sins, repentant sorrow, moves;
Father in care, mother in tender heart,

Receive and save me, slain with sinful dart!"

In the fourth verse of this stanza, it is obvious that weeping sins and repentant sorrow are equivalent expressions, made use of merely to lengthen out the line to a required measure; but with this exception, the quotation will be found to be a favourable one, and will make the reader acquainted with the metre and the manner of the poem. The minor pieces have in their time had many admirers. Ben Jonson is said to have told Drummond of Hawthornden, that, so he had written that piece of his [Southwell's] The Burning Babe,' he would have been contented to have destroyed many of his." We are glad the opportunity was not afforded him, since the little allegory which the dramatist referred to is far from having any claim to rank amongst the foremost of these lesser poems. A better choice in every respect-but especially better in regard to the simple and affecting earnestness with which a momentous and much disregarded truth is urged-might have been found in the lines "upon the Image of Death," for a few stanzas from which we must find room :

"Before my face the picture hangs,

That daily should put me in mind
Of those cold names and bitter pangs,
That shortly I am like to find:
But yet, alas! full little I

Do think hereon that I must die.

"I often look upon a face

Most ugly, grisly, bare and thin;

I often view the hollow place,

Where eyes and nose had sometime been :

I see the bones across that lie,

Yet little think that I must die.

And then, after dwelling on the impotence of Solomon's wisdom and of Samson's strength, and of Alexander's and Julius Cæsar's wide-spread rule, to save them from the universal destroyer, he concludes the poem with this appealing stanza:

"If none can 'scape Death's dreadful dart,
If rich and poor his beck obey;

If strong, if wise, if all do smart,

Then I to 'scape shall have no way.
Oh! grant me grace, O God! that I
My life may mend, sith I must die."

At every step that we advance in our series some new tale of misery or horror meets us. Southwell, enlisting boldly in a noble service of which he might foresee the fatal end, encountered in his martyr's death a fate that might have moved the envy of the able and aspiring Overbury. Dying in a dark, unwholesome prison, under the protracted agonies of poisons administered with so little skill that it needed more than three months, and the assistance of an abler hand at last, to complete the work, Overbury had no religious enthusiasm, no consciousness of a great mission gloriously closed, to uphold him in his last moments; no sympathy of friends to comfort him; and certainly no well-established hope of signal recompense beyond the grave. He had lived a courtier's life, and he died a miserable

death.

And yet what is known of him makes it evident that he had capacity for greater things than any he accomplished. Born in the year 1581, he became a gentleman commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, at the age of fourteen; and having taken his Bachelor's degree three years afterwards, he settled in the Middle Temple, studying law. Subsequently to this he spent some time in foreign travel, furnishing himself, as we are told, “ with things fitting a statesman, by experience in foreign government, knowledge of the language, passages of employment, external courtship, and good be

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haviour things not common to every man." It was in his twenty-first year that his acquaintance with Robert Carr, afterwards Earl of Somerset, began to ripen into intimate association. From this time their friendship and court-favour rapidly advanced. But there was also growing up at the same time, in the family of the Earl of Suffolk, a daughter, whose distinguished beauty was to prove fatal to the friendship and the favour of both of them, and even to the life of Overbury. Married at an early age to the young Earl of Essex, this lady, before she had ceased to be a child, became the idol of a profligate court. And mutual passion grew up between her and Somerset, and a divorce from Essex was artfully obtained by the countess, in order to get rid of the impediment to a legal union with her lover. During the progress of this intrigue, Overbury had in vain endeavoured to set free his friend from the entanglement; and after the marriage of the guilty pair, his zealous efforts becoming known to the countess, gave birth to the deadliest resentment in her breast. A pretext was soon made for procuring his commitment to the Tower, where he was consigned to the clumsy, as well as cruel, practices of her villainous agents. After torturing their victim for the space of three months, with poisonous drugs, it was found necessary to employ a foreign adept, who was recommended by the king's physician. By him the work was soon ended. Overbury died on the 15th of September, 1613;-died from poison, administered, it is supposed, without the knowledge or connivance of Somerset, although both he and his countess were shortly afterwards found guilty of the murder; but with the knowledge and connivance, as the editor more than intimates, of the perfidious king himself, by whom the noble pair were subsequently pardoned.

The extraordinary interest which was excited by the death of Overbury appears to have extended itself by sympathy to the one poem, "A Wife," on which his poetical reputation strictly rests. It is only on this supposition that we can at all account for the popularity of that piece on its first appearance, or for the multitudes of" Elegies"-themselves a proof of that popularity-which the editor prefixes to the poem. The true merit of the composition is quite other than poetical: it contains nothing elevated, or imaginative, or impassioned; no charm of sentiment or fancy; no tenderness of feeling and no felicity of images; and certainly, no very exalted conception of the highest qualities and graces of a woman's genuine worth. His great contemporary might have inspired Overbury with a far nobler and far truer ideal of female excellence-an ideal, richer far in poetry because more far-seeing into the spiritual loveliness of a good and perfect wife.

The virtues and the charms that Overbury dwells on in his poem are just those that any judicious and acute man would wish for in a wife-the homespun steady-going qualities that may be warranted to wear well in the routine of married life; and the virtues and the charms that he takes no notice of, are, on the other hand, just those which involve all the higher faculties of a woman's soul, and all the most glorious purposes and ends and aspirations of her nature. But the prosaic view which he puts forward is undoubtedly maintained with a good deal of brevity and point and quaintness, and, now and then, with aphoristic sense and strength. Nothing, for instance, can be better in its way than his well-known line

"He comes too neere, that comes to be denide;"

and something of the same kind of skill, in a less degree, is manifested in the terseness of the following stanza

Throughout the composition all the best passages are in this manner, and derive their value mainly from clearness and conciseness of expression, and an intellectual acuteness which has certainly more affinity with wit than with poetry.

In Sir Thomas Overbury's "Characters," in which he has cast off the restraints of rhyme and metre, his understanding moves with greater freedom, and with a more agreeable and graceful step, than in his poem. But the distinctive qualities of both are of the same kind. The striking peculiarities of the several characters are, for the most part, well hit off in sharp and clear and quaint expressions, and with abundant point and tartness, if not wit. The pleasantest and best of them-to which, in truth, the writer's heart appears to have contributed not less than his intellect-is the character of A faire and happy Milk-mayde," of whom, amongst other sweet and pretty fancies, he tells us :

"The golden eares of corne fall and kiss her feet when she reapes them, as if they wisht to be bound and led prisoners by the same hand that fell'd them."..." She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heart soft with pitty: and when winter evenings fall early [sitting at her merry wheele] she sings a defiance to the giddy wheele of fortune." "She dares goe alone, and unfold sheepe i' th' night, and feares no manner of ill, because she meanes none: yet to say truth, she is never alone, for she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones; yet they have their efficacy, in that they are not pauled with insuing idle cogitations."

Drummond of Hawthornden, who has kept his place for two centuries amongst the well-remembered poets of the past, was born in the year 1585, and died in the early days of December, 1649. He enjoyed a learned education, travelled much and profitably, and commanded by his wealth and taste all the accessories of a life of elegant and studious ease. Some of the selectest fruits of his retirement are found in this collection of his poetical works. In the great conflict of the times he lived in, Drummond was a zealous and attached royalist; and his death, as we have already intimated, is sometimes supposed to have been hastened by his grief at the execution of the king. His poems, with few exceptions, were published during the last twenty-five years of his own lifetime.

Ben Jonson said of Drummond's verses, that they smelled of the schooles; to which Mr. Willmott, in his "Lives of Sacred Poets," replies, "they were the schools of nature. Not one of his contemporaries had a heart more susceptible of her music, or looked out upon her beauty less frequently through the spectacles of books.'" This favourable testimony is confirmed by the poems themselves. They are rich enough, undoubtedly, in proofs of the writer's wide and intimate acquaintance with literature, and his affection for Italian literature; but they are richer still in indications of the love which nature teaches those who watch and wait upon her in the ever-varying aspects of her inexhaustible loveliness. We take this to be one of the greatest and most constant charms of Drummond's compositions. But along with it there is very commonly the accompaniment of a vein of pleasing pensiveness, and of a genuine, though not deep feeling, which is manifested most frequently in strains of sweet and gentle tenderness. It is this harmony of moderate powers, rather than the predominance of any one magnificent faculty, which has formed, as far as the GENT. MAG. VOL, CCII.

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essence of his poetry is concerned, one of the main supports of Drummond's popularity. His versification, in which correctness of nature, purity of language, and melody of sound, are happily combined, has also had, as it deserved to have, a very considerable share in keeping his poetic reputation unimpaired.

Amidst the somewhat voluminous effusions of Drummond's pen, it is, we think, to be regretted that some few and short pieces are to be met with in which this serious and elegant, and sometimes devout writer, would seem to have been trying experiments in grossness, and triumphing in his own deplorable success. The editor has done well to give his author unmutilated even of his blemishes; but it must be declared that the poems we refer to are blemishes-only the more revolting from the pure and high environment in which we find them.

It was probably from his familiarity with Italian literature that Drummond learned his love of the sonnet, and his very considerable mastery over that complicated form of verse. His sonnets are, upon the whole, undoubtedly his happiest compositions. He is often critically exact, both in the verbal structure and the unity and character of thought which are exacted by the example and authority of the best masters. Hallam admits that his poems of this kind "would have acquired a fair place among the Italians of the sixteenth century." They certainly deserve a high rank amongst the sonnets in our own language. We cannot give the reader a fairer specimen of his poetic skill than by setting before him that which is addressed to the nightingale :

"Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours,

Of winter's past or coming void of care,

Well-pleased with delights which present are,

Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers,

To rocks, to springs, to rills, from leafy bowers

Thou thy Creator's goodness dost declare,

And what dear gifts on thee he did not spare,

A stain to human sense in sin that lowers.
What soul can be so sick which by thy songs,
Attir'd in sweetness, sweetly is not driven
Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites, and wrongs,
And lift a reverend eye and thought to heaven ?
Sweet artless songster, thou my mind dost raise
To airs of spheres, yes, and to angels' lays."

CHALDEA AND SUSIANA a.

THE interest aroused by the discoveries at Nineveh is not likely to abate, but will rather excite further researches in unexplored regions, which, if not surpassing in splendour, may at least vie in historical interest and value with those made in Assyria. Chaldæa has been almost lost in the darkness of lapsing ages; the light now let in upon its obscurity dazzles the sober imagination of the antiquarian, and excites the strongest hopes that the few pages yet remaining to complete the records of the past may ere long be satisfactorily filled up.

"Travels and Researches in Chaldæa and Susiana; with an Account of Excavations at Warka, the Erech' of Nimrod, and Shush, Shushan the Palace' of Esther, in 1849-52, under the Orders of Major-General Sir W. F. Williams of Kars, Bart., K.C.B., M.P., and also of the Assyrian Excavation Fund in 1853-4. By William Kennett Loftus, F.G.S." (London: James Nisbet & Co.)