authorship,
we believe that we are correct in stating it to be a posthumous
production of the author of the Bride's Tragedy; Mr. Thomas Lovell
Beddoes. Speaking of the latter production, now more than a quarter
of a century ago, (Mr. Beddoes was then, we believe, a student
at Pembroke College, Oxford, and a minor,) the _Edinburgh Review_
ventured upon a prediction of future fame and achievement for the
writer, which an ill-chosen and ill-directed subsequent career
unhappily intercepted and baffled. But in proof of the noble natural
gifts which suggested such anticipation, the production before us
remains: and we may judge to what extent a more steady course and
regular cultivation would have fertilized a soil, which, neglected
and uncared for, has thrown out such a glorious growth of foliage and
fruit as this Fool's Tragedy."

The following exquisite lyric is among the passages with which these
judgments are sustained:

"If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep;
And not a sorrow
Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
Lie still and deep
Sad soul, until like sea-wave washes
The rim o' the sun to-morrow,
In eastern sky.

But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then die, dear, die;
'Tis deeper, sweeter,
Than on a rose bank to lie dreaming
With folded eye;
And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love's stars, thou'lt meet her
In eastern sky."

* * * * *

WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED.

Praed, it has always seemed to us, was the cleverest writer in his
way that has ever contributed to the English periodicals. His fugitive
lyrics and arabesque romances, half sardonic and half sentimental,
published with Hookham Frere's "Whistlecraft" and Macaulay's Roundhead
Ballads, in _Knight's Quarterly Magazine_, and after the suspension
of that work, for the most part in the annual souvenirs, are
altogether unequaled in the class of compositions described as
_vers de societie_.--Who that has read "School and School Fellows",
"Palinodia", "The Vicar", "Josephine", and a score of other pieces in
the same vein, does not desire to possess all the author has left us,
in a suitable edition? It has been frequently stated in the English
journals that such a collection was to be published, under the
direction of Praed's widow, but we have yet only the volume prepared
by a lover of the po