n the middle of last century boldly assigned to Lord Chesterfield.
His compositions circulated from hand to hand at Court. They were read
in polished coteries. So little did they ever become a national
possession that, complete or incomplete, the most considerable of them
has vanished, all but a fragment. Small as is the whole body of verse
attributed to him, not all is clearly his. Dr. Hannah, and other ardent
admirers of his muse, have been unable to satisfy themselves whether he
really wrote _False Love and True Love_, with its shifting rhythm, and
its bewitching scattered phrases; the Shepherd's fantastically witty
_Description of Love_, or _Anatomy of Love_--

It is a yea, it is a nay;

or the perfect conceit, which Waller could not have bettered in wit or
equalled in vivacity, with the refrain--

What care I how fair she be!

Twenty-seven other poems, among them, the bright sneering _Invective
against Women_, have been put down to him on no other ground than that
they cannot be traced to a different source. He might have been the
author of the graceful _Praise of his Sacred Diana_. He might have
sighed for a land devoid of envy,

Unless among
The birds, for prize of their sweet song.

From him might have come the airy melody of the charming eclogue
_Phyllida's Love-call to her Corydon_, which invites the genius of a
Mendelssohn to frame it in music. He might have penned in his prison
cell the knell for the tragedy of human life, _De Morte_. He might have
been the shepherd minstrel of the flowers--

You pretty daughters of the earth and sun.

But, unfortunately, the sole pretext for affirming his title, as the
editors of the 1829 collection of his works affirmed it, is that the
poems are found in the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, in Davison's _Poetical
Rhapsody_, or in _England's Helicon_, and are there marked 'Ignoto.'

[Sidenote: _Carelessness of Literary Renown._]

The assignment, often, as Mr. Bullen shows in his editions of _England's
Helicon_, and _A Poetical Rhapsody_, without the slightest authority or
foundation, of poetic foundlings of rare charm and distinction to Ralegh
is a token of the prevalent belief in the unfathomed range of his
powers. At the same time it implies that he had never been adopted, and
identified, by the contemporary public specifically as a poet. He would
not be discontented with the degree and kind of the poetic fame conceded
to