27-8. There may be a reminiscence of these lines in Campbell's Battle of the Baltic (G. T., CCLI. 55-63).

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31. Cp. Campbell again in Ye Mariners of England (G.T., CCL. 25, 26), With thunders from her native oak She quells the floods below."

15. All in the Downs the fleet was moor'd

JOHN GAY was born at Barnstaple in 1688. He was apprenticed to a London silk-mercer, but soon abandoned this trade for literature. He dedicated his first poem to Pope, who became his friend. His most famous achievement is his Beggar's Opera, 1728, which was said to have made "Gay rich and Rich (the manager) gay.' But little of his work is now read except the two ballads of Black-Eyed Susan and 'Twas when the Seas were Roaring, and perhaps his Fables. He was a great favourite in society, and the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry took him to live with them in his last years. Dying in 1732, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Pope wrote his epitaph, beginning “Of manners gentle, of affections mild; In wit a man, simplicity a child."

1. Downs, "The part of the sea within the Goodwin Sands, off the east coast of Kent, a famous rendezvous for ships. It lies opposite to the eastern termination of the North Downs" (N. E. D.).

2. streamers, flags. Cp. Shakespeare, Henry V., III., Prologue, 6, "His brave fleet With silken streamers the young Phoebus fanning."

15. chance is probably a verb for 'it chance,' but practically takes the place of an adverb 'by chance.' Cp. Shakespeare, II. Henry IV., II. i. 12, "It may chance cost some of us our lives" Merry Wives, v. v. 230, "How chance you went not with Master Slender?" Also cp. No. 36. 95.

16. Of all the girls that are so smart

"A LITTLE masterpiece in a very difficult style: Catullus himself could hardly have bettered it. In grace, tenderness, simplicity, and humour, it is worthy of the Ancients: and even more so, from the completeness and unity of the picture presented " (F. T. P.).

HENRY CAREY (died 1743) was a musician and a writer of operas and burlesques, the most famous of which is Chrononhotonthologos, "the most tragical tragedy ever yet tragedized by any company of tragedians. The authorship of God Save the King is sometimes attributed to him, and was claimed for him

by his son, but apparently without reason. Sally in our Alley, first published about 1715, won praise, according to Carey himself, from ‘the divine Addison.' Carey also said that the poem owed its origin to his having 'dodged' a 'prentice treating his mistress to various London amusements.

35. lurch. "The phrase 'to leave in the lurch' was derived from its use in an old game; to lurch is still used in playing cribbage.... The game is mentioned in Cotgrave: F. lourche, the game called Lurche, or a Lurch in game; il demeura lourche, he was left in the lurch.' He also gives: Ourche, the game at table called lurch'" (Skeat). To leave in the lurch' has come to mean leave in a forlorn condition.'

17. Go fetch to me a pint o' wine

BURNS stated that the first four lines were old. Messrs. Henley and Henderson (Poetry of Burns, Vol. II.), say: "A ballad, O Errol, it's a bonny place, in Sharpe's Ballad Book (1823) begins thus:

"Go fetch to me a pint of wine,

Go fill it to the brim;

That I may drink my gude Lord's health,

Tho' Errol be his name."

And Burns may have had little more than some such suggestion for his brilliant and romantic first quatrain.'

2. tassie, S., goblet. French, tasse.

4. service, i.e. in token of my duty to her.

5. Leith, the Port of Edinburgh.

6. ferry, across the Firth of Forth.

7. rides, floats at anchor.

the Berwick-law, North Berwick Law, in Haddingtonshire, overlooking the Firth of Forth. Law is a Scottish and Northumbrian term for a hill, especially one more or less round of conical.

12. thick. Another reading is deep.

18. If doughty deeds my lady please

ROBERT GRAHAM, of Gartmore, on the borders of Perth and Stirling, was in early life a planter in Jamaica. He was chosen rector of Glasgow University in 1785, in opposition to Burke ; and represented the county of Stirling in parliament from 1794 to 1796. Scott inserted this song in the first edition of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, under the impression that it

was of the age of Charles I. It had, he wrote after the real authorship had been discovered, "much of the romantic expression of passion, common to the poets of that period, whose lays still reflected the setting beams of chivalry."

1. doughty, valiant, applied both to persons and things. It is an old English word corresponding to the German tüchtig, capable. It is still in use, but always with an archaic, and generally with a humorous flavour.

12. trow, believe. Cp. Luke (A.V.) xvii. 9, "I trow not."

14 dight, equip, dress. The verb was derived from the Latin dictare, and originally meant to dictate,' then 'to appoint, ordain.' The meaning 'put in order, array, dress,' is, however, an early one; and this is the use that has survived in literature chiefly in the past participle.

16. squire. See No. 12. 12 and note.

23. No maiden blames me for her ruin. Skaith, S., hurt, damage: used as a verb in No. 38. 13. Cp. English scathe, and Germ. schaden. 66 Ha, how grete harme and skaith for evermare that child has caucht, throw lesing of his moder," Douglas, Virgil.

25. ride the ring. Cp. Scott in Rosabelle (G. T., CCLXXXI. 21), ""Tis not because the ring they ride." "A ring was suspended, not tightly fastened, but so that it could easily be detached from a horizontal beam resting on two upright posts. The players rode at full speed through the archway thus made, and as they went under passed their lance-points, or aimed at passing them, through the ring, and so bore it off. See Ellis's Brand's Popular Antiquities, re-edited by Hazlitt" (Prof. Hales).

19. Sweet stream, that winds through yonder glade THE limpid purity of the stream and the smoothness of its surface find their counterparts in the exquisite purity and simplicity of the language and the unbroken melody of the verse. 4. Cp. Gray in his Elegy (No. 36. 73), "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." We may contrast the surroundings of the heroine of Matthew Arnold's Requiescat: Her life was turning, turning, In mazes of heat and sound."

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9. watery glass, the smooth and transparent surface of the stream.

20. Sleep on, and dream of Heaven awhile

By his dates (1763-1855) SAMUEL ROGERS, the contemporary of Wordsworth and Byron, belongs to the period covered by the Fourth Book of the Golden Treasury. But though the influence of Wordsworth and the new romantic movement is manifest in

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his Italy, written 1819-1834, the merits of Rogers' best work are rather those of the eighteenth century than those of the newer verse. In this poem and in No. 34 we have-as in so much of Cowper-the tenderness, thoughtfulness and grace" that were destined, as Sir Henry Taylor said, to be "trampled in the dust" along with the "didactic dulness" of which the nineteenth century accused the eighteenth.

Some of the differences between the poetry of the two centuries will be suggested by a comparison of this poem with Tennyson's Sleeping Beauty, one of the sections of The DayDream. Much nearer to the tone of Rogers is Hood's poem, The Death Bed (G.T., CCLXXIX.).

21. For ever, Fortune, wilt thou prove

"PERHAPS no writer who has given such strong proofs of the poetic nature has left less satisfactory poetry than Thomson. Yet this song, with Rule Britannia and a few others, must make us regret that he did not more seriously apply himself to lyrical writing" (F. T. P.).

3. mutual, reciprocating our feeling, loving us as we love it.

7. genial, full of cheerfulness and vitality. In the old Roman religion the Genius was the tutelary spirit that watched over each individual life: this Genius was "the source of the good gifts and hours which brighten the life of the individual man, and also the source of his physical and mental health-in a word, his good spirit" (Preller). See note on No. 5. 15, "Genii."

10. loveless, joyless vow, the French mariage de convenance. 14. absolve thee from caring for me in the future. 16. Make but, i. e. If only thou wilt make. With this substitution of an imperative for a conditional clause, compare the similar construction in Virgil, Eclogue x. 4-6, Sic tibi. Doris amara suam non intermisceat undam: Incipe.

22. The merchant, to secure his treasure

...

MATTHEW PRIOR, poet and diplomatist, was born in Dorsetshire in 1664. He was educated at Westminster under Dr. Busby, and at St. John's College, Cambridge. His City Mouse and Country Mouse written, in conjunction with Montague, to ridicule Dryden's Hind and Panther, procured him an appointment as secretary to the embassy at the Hague. He served in other embassies, and in 1713-4 was ambassador at Paris. With the fall of the Tories in 1714 his prosperity came to an end. He died in 1721. See Johnson's Lives of the Poets and Thackeray's English Humourists. For Cowper's high opinion of Prior's verse see the quotation in the introductory note to No. 14.

"Prior's seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humourous of English lyrical poems. Horace is always in his mind; and his song, and his philosophy, his good sense, his happy easy turns and melody, his loves and his Epicureanism bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and accomplished master."-Thackeray, English Humourists.

"His is the 'nameless charm' of Piron's epigram, that fugitive je ne sais quoi of gaiety, of wit, of grace, of audacity, it is impossible to say what, which eludes analysis as the principle of life escapes the anatomist. In the present case it lifts its possessor above any other writer of familiar verse; but it is something to which we cannot give a name, unless, indeed, we take refuge in paradox, and say that it is... MATTHEW PRIOR."-Austin Dobson in Ward's English Poets.

2. Conveys, etc., i.e. Professes his cargo to be something less valuable than it really is. On this passage Prof. Rowley writes to me as follows: "It is far, I imagine, from being the only passage in the poets in which the parallelism between the thing that illustrates and the thing illustrated is not consistently maintained throughout, either breaking down before it reaches the end or being intermittent only. Here the poet, making love to Euphelia while he means love to Cloe, seems to be struck by the resemblance of his conduct to that of a merchant who consigns a specially precious commodity under a lying label, thinking it will thereby be conveyed to its destination in greater safety; and so, in his good ship, Verse,' consigns Love to Cloe labelled Love to Euphelia, without concerning himself about the delivery of his commodity-how Cloe is to get that which is really hers. veys' doubtless stands for 'gets it conveyed.""

7. noted, made known.

23.

Never seek to tell thy love

'Con

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827), poet, painter, designer and mystic, is one of the most remarkable figures in English literature and English art. He lived apart from his contemporaries, by whom he was not appreciated or understood; and drawing inspiration from the Elizabethan poets, but still more from Nature herself, he anticipated in some ways the romantic movement in English poetry which is often dated from the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1798.

"With what insight and tenderness, yet in how few words, has this painter-poet here himself told Love's Secret!" (F.T.P.) Metre.-Irregular. Blake did not write his verses by the book. Rules of verse are meant to help, not to trammel, the artist; and the poet must in each case decide for himself how far he will abide by them. He may make or mar his poem by a