e, to recommend them; but there are a few that, from
the feelings and circumstances that gave rise to them, will, I have no
doubt, be interesting to the reader. When he first went to Newstead,
on his arrival from Aberdeen, he planted, it seems, a young oak in
some part of the grounds, and had an idea that as it flourished so
should he. Some six or seven years after, on revisiting the spot, he
found his oak choked up by weeds, and almost destroyed. In this
circumstance, which happened soon after Lord Grey de Ruthen left
Newstead, originated one of these poems, which consists of five
stanzas, but of which the few opening lines will be a sufficient
specimen:--

"Young Oak, when I planted thee deep in the ground,
I hoped that thy days would be longer than mine;
That thy dark-waving branches would flourish around,
And ivy thy trunk with its mantle entwine.

"Such, such was my hope, when, in infancy's years,
On the land of my fathers I rear'd thee with pride;
They are past, and I water thy stem with my tears,--
Thy decay, not the weeds that surround thee can hide.

"I left thee, my Oak, and, since that fatal hour,
A stranger has dwelt in the hall of my sire," &c. &c.

The subject of the verses that follow is sufficiently explained by the
notice which he has prefixed to them; and, as illustrative of the
romantic and almost lovelike feeling which he threw into his school
friendships, they appeared to me, though rather quaint and elaborate,
to be worth preserving.

"Some years ago, when at H----, a friend of the author engraved on a
particular spot the names of both, with a few additional words as a
memorial. Afterwards, on receiving some real or imagined injury, the
author destroyed the frail record before he left H----. On revisiting
the place in 1807, he wrote under it the following stanzas:--

"Here once engaged the stranger's view
Young Friendship's record simply traced;
Few were her words,--but yet though few,
Resentment's hand the line defaced.

"Deeply she cut--but, not erased,
The characters were still so plain,
That Friendship once return'd, and gazed,--
Till Memory hail'd the words again.

"Repentance placed them as before;
Forgiveness join'd her gentle name;
So fair the inscription seem'd once more
That Friendship thought it still the same.

"Thus might the record now have been;
But,