is gaiety and wit, he wearies one at
last with that clever, punning antithesis. I don't want to know how

"Captain Hazard wins a bet,
Or Beaulieu spoils a curry"--

and I prefer his sombre "Red Fisherman," the idea of which is borrowed,
wittingly or unwittingly, from Lucian.

Thackeray, too careless in his measures, yet comes nearer Prior in
breadth of humour and in unaffected tenderness. Who can equal that song,
"Once you come to Forty Year," or the lines on the Venice Love-lamp, or
the "Cane-bottomed Chair"? Of living English writers of verse in the
"familiar style," as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr. Locker when he is tender
and not untouched with melancholy, as in "The Portrait of a Lady," and
Mr. Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest, as in the
"Song of Four Seasons" and "The Dead Letter." He has ingenuity, pathos,
mastery of his art, and, though the least pedantic of poets, is
"conveniently learned."

Of contemporary Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse of Mr.
Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the "Heathen
Chinee," as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of children that
slipped its moorings in the fog. To me it seems that Mr. Bret Harte's
poems have never (at least in this country) been sufficiently esteemed.
Mr. Lowell has written ("The Biglow Papers" apart) but little in this
vein. Mr. Wendell Holmes, your delightful godfather, Gifted, has written
much with perhaps some loss from the very quantity. A little of _vers de
societe_, my dear Gifted, goes a long way, as you will think, if ever you
sit down steadily to read right through any collection of poems in this
manner. So do not add too rapidly to your own store; let them be "few,
but roses" all of them.

RICHARDSON

_By Mrs. Andrew Lang_.

Dear Miss Somerville,--I was much interested in your fruitless struggle
to read "Sir Charles Grandison,"--the book whose separate numbers were
awaited with such impatience by Richardson's endless lady friends and
correspondents, and even by the rakish world--even by Colley Cibber
himself. I sympathize entirely with your estimate of its dulness; yet,
dull as it is, it is worth wading through to understand the kind of
literature which could flutter the dove-cotes of the last century in a
generation earlier than the one that was moved to tears by the wearisome
dramas of Hannah More.

There is only one character in the whole of "Sir Ch