"Listen, Henry, to my reed!
Not from fairy realms I lead
Bright-robed tradition, to relate
In forged colours Arthur's fate;
Though much of old romantic lore
On the high theme I keep in store :
But boastful fiction should be dumb,

Where truth the strain might best become.
If thine ear may still be won

With songs of Uther's glorious son;
Henry, I a tale unfold,

Never yet in rhyme enroll'd,

Nor sung nor harp'd in hall or bower;
Which in my youth's full early flower,
A minstrel, sprung of Cornish line,
Who spoke of kings from old Locrine,
Taught me to chant, one vernal dawn,
Deep in a cliff-encircled lawn,

What time the glistening vapours fled
From cloud-envelop'd Clyder's head;
And on its sides the torrents gray
Shone to the morning's orient ray.

When Arthur bow'd his haughty crest,
No princess, veil'd in azure vest,
Snatch'd him, by Merlin's potent spell,
In groves of golden bliss to dwell;

Where, crown'd with wreaths of misletoe,
Slaughter'd kings in glory go:

But when he fell, with winged speed,
His champions, on a milk-white steed,
From the battle's hurricane,

Bore him to Joseph's towered fane,
In the fair vale of Avalon :
There with chanted orison
And the long blaze of tapers clear,
The stoled fathers met the bier;
Through the dim aisles, in order dread
Of martial woe, the chief they led,
And deep entomb'd in holy ground,
Before the altar's solemn bound.
Around no dusky banners wave,
No mouldering trophies mark the grave:
Away the ruthless Dane has torn

rede, tale.

Each trace that time's slow touch had worn;
And long o'er the neglected stone
Oblivion's vale its shade has thrown :
The faded tomb, with honour due,

'Tis thine, O Henry, to renew!
Thither, when conquest has restor❜d

Yon recreant isle, and sheath'd the sword, When peace with palm has crown'd thy brows, Haste thee to pay thy pilgrim vows.

There, observant of my lore,

The pavement's hallow'd depth explore;
And thrice a fathom underneath

Dive into the vaults of death.

There shall thine eye, with wild amaze,
On his gigantic stature gaze;

There shalt thou find the monarch laid,
All in warrior-weeds array'd;
Wearing in death his helmet-crown,
And weapons huge of old renown,
Martial prince, 'tis thine to save
From dark oblivion Arthur's grave!
So may thy ships securely stem
The western frith: thy diadem

Shine victorious in the van,

Nor heed the slings of Ulster's clan :
Thy Norman pike-men win their way
Up the dun rocks of Harald's bay:
And from the steeps of rough Kildare
Thy prancing hoofs the falcon scare:
So may thy bow's unerring yew

Its shafts in Roderick's heart imbrew.'
Amid the pealing symphony
The spiced goblets mantled high;
With passions new the song impress'd
The listening king's impatient breast:
Flash the keen lightnings from his eyes;
He scorns a while his bold emprise :
Ev'n now he seems, with eager pace,
The consecrated floor to trace ;

And ope, from its tremendous gloom,
The treasure of the wonderous tomb :
Ev'n now, he burns in thought to rear,
From its dark bed, the ponderous spear,
Rough with the gore of Pictish kings:
Ev'n now fond hope his fancy wings,
To poise the monarch's massy blade,
Of magic-temper'd metal made;
And drag to-day the dinted shield
That felt the storm of Camlan's field.
O'er the sepulchre profound

Ev'n now, with arching sculpture crown'd,
He plans the chantry's choral shrine,
The daily dirge, and rites divine.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE.]-King Henry the Second having undertaken an expedition into Ireland, to suppress a rebellion raised by Roderick King of Connaught, commonly called O Connor Dun, or the Brown Monarch of Ireland, was entertained, in his passage through Wales, with the songs of the Welsh bards. The subject of their poetry was King Arthur, whose history had been so disguised by fabulous inventions, that the place of his burial was in general scarcely known or remembered. But in one of these Welsh poems sung before Henry, it was recited, that King Arthur, after the battle of Camlan, in Cornwall, was interred at Glastonbury abbey, before the high altar, yet without any external mark or memorial. Afterwards Henry visited the abbey, and commanded the spot described by the bard to be opened: When digging near 20 feet deep, they found the body, deposited under a large stone, inscribed with Arthur's name. This is the ground-work of the [preceding] ode: But for the better accommodation of the story to our present purpose, it is told with some slight variations from the Chronicle of Glastonbury. The castle of Cilgarran, where this discovery is supposed to have been made, now a romantic ruin, stands on a rock descending to the river Teivi, in Pembrokeshire; and was built by Roger Montgomery, who led the van of the Normans at Hastings.

From a Panegyric on Oxford Ale.
Balm of my cares, sweet solace of my toils,
Hail juice benignant! O'er the costly cups
Of riot-stirring wine, unwholesome draught,
Let pride's loose sons prolong the wasteful night;
My sober ev'ning let the tankard bless,
With toast embrown'd, and fragrant nutmeg fraught,
While the rich draught with oft-repeated whiffs
Tobacco mild improves. Divine repast!
Where no crude surfeit, or intemperate joys
Of lawless Bacchus' reign; but o'er my soul
A calm Lethean creeps; in drowsy trance
Each thought subsides, and sweet oblivion wraps
My peaceful brain, as if the leaden rod

Of magic Morpheus o'er mine eyes had shed
Its opiate influence. What though sore ills

Oppress, dire want of chill-dispelling coals
Or cheerful candle (save the make-weight's gleam
Haply remaining), heart-rejoicing ale

Cheers the sad scene, and every want supplies.
Meantime, not mindless of the daily talk
Of tutor sage, upon the learned leaves
Of deep Smiglecius much I meditate;
While ale inspires, and lends its kindred aid,
The thought-perplexing labour to pursue,
Sweet Helicon of logic! But if friends
Congenial call me from the toilsome page,
To pot-house I repair, the sacred haunt,
Where, ale, thy votaries in full resort
Hold rites nocturnal. . . .

Martinus Smiglecius, a Polish Jesuit, was the author of a Logica Disputationibus Illustrata.

His

was born at Bristol, 20th November 1752. father, a sub-chanter in the cathedral, and master of a charity school, was a roistering fellow, yet a lover of books and coins, a dabbler in magic; he had died in the August before the poet was born. The mother, a poor schoolmistress and needlewoman, brought up her boy and his sister beneath the shadow of St Mary Redcliffe, that glorious church where their forefathers had been sextons since the days of Elizabeth. He seemed a dull, dreamy child till his seventh year; then he 'fell in love' with an old illuminated music folio, and, quickly learning to read from a black-letter Bible, began to devour every book that fell in his way. He was a scholar of Colston's Bluecoat Hospital from 1760 till 1767, and then he was bound apprentice to Lambert, an attorney. In December 1762 he wrote his first poem, On the Last Epiphany; in 1763 borrowed Speght's blackletter Chaucer from a lending library; and in the summer of 1764 produced the first of his pseudo-antiques, Elinoure and Juga, which imposed on the junior usher of his school, and which he professed to have got from Canynge's Coffer in the muniment-room of St Mary's. Next, early in 1767, for one Burgum, a pewterer, he concocted a pedigree of the De Bergham family (this brought him ten shillings); and in 1768 he hoaxed the whole city with a description, 'from an old manuscript,' of the opening of Bristol Bridge in 1248.

His life at Lambert's was a sordid one; he slept with the footboy, and took his meals in the kitchen. Yet, his duties over-and he discharged them well -he had ample leisure for his darling studies, poetry, history, heraldry, music, antiquities. An attempt to draw Dodsley had failed, when, in March 1769, he sent Horace Walpole a 'transcript' of The Ryse of Peyncteynge, written by T. Rowlie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge. Walpole, quite taken

in, wrote at once to his unknown correspondent, expressing a thousand thanks for the manuscript. deploring his ignorance of the Saxon language,' and half offering to usher the Rowley Poems to the world. Back came a fresh batch of manuscript, and with it a sketch of Chatterton's own history. The poems, however, being shown to Mason and Gray, were pronounced by them to be forgeries; and Walpole's next letter was a letter of advice to stick to his calling, that so, when he should have made a fortune, he might unbend himself with the studies consonant to his inclinations.' A curt request for the return of the MSS. lay six weeks unanswered during Walpole's absence in Paris. A second came, still curter; and, snapping up poems and letters,' Walpole returned both to him, and thought no more of him or them'-until, two years after, Goldsmith told him of Chatterton's death.

...

Was it jest or grim earnest, a boyish freak or a suicide's farewell, that 'Last Will and Testament of Thomas Chatterton . . . executed in the presence of Omniscience this 14th of April 1770'? Anyhow, falling into his master's hands, it procured the hasty cancelling of his indentures; and ten days later the boy quitted Bristol for London. There he arrived with his poems, and perhaps five guineas in his pocket, and lodged first at one Walmsley's, a plasterer, in Shoreditch; next, from the middle of June, at Brooke Street, Holborn. Abstemious, sleepless, he fell to work as with a hundred hands, pouring forth satires, squibs, stories, political essays, burlettas, epistles in Junius's style (for 'Wilkes and liberty'), and the matchless Balade of Charitie. For a while his prospects seemed golden. The publishers spoke him fair; he obtained an interview with the Lord Mayor Beckford; in the first two months he earned eleven guineas (at the rate of from a farthing to twopence a line); and he sent home glowing letters, with a box of presents for his mother and sister. Then Beckford died; the 'patriotic' publishers took fright; the dead season set in; he had overstocked the market with unpaid wares; a last desperate application failed for the post of surgeon to a Bristol slaver. He was penniless, starving, yet too proud to accept the meal his landlady offered him, when, on 24th August 1770, he locked himself into his garret, tore up his papers, and was fourd the next morning dead-poisoned with arsenic. They buried him in the paupers' pit of the Shoe Lane Workhouse, a site usurped fifty-six years later by Farringdon Market.

For eighty years the Rowley controversy was waged with no less bitterness than ignorance, the Rowleyans including Jacob Bryant (1781), Dean Milles (1782), and Dr S. R. Maitland (1857); the anti-Rowleyans, Tyrwhitt (1777-82) and Thomas Warton (1778-82). The subject was once and for ever laid to rest by Professor Skeat in his edition of Chatterton's Poetical Works (2 vols. 1875). Voli contains Chatterton's acknowledged poems, seventy

eight in number; vol. ii. the forty-three Rowley poems, with an essay thereon by the editor. Almost unconsciously Professor Skeat establishes Chatterton's wondrous originality. Theft from an unknown poet?—there is not the slightest indication that Chatterton had ever seen a MS. of early date.' Indebtedness to Chaucer?-he had 'read very little of this excellent author. . . . If he had really taken pains to read and study Chaucer, or Lydgate, or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley Poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are rather less like the literature of that period than of any other. . . . The metres are mostly wrong, the rimes are sometimes faulty ; the words [taken mostly from Kersey's Dictionary, and 93 per cent. of them misused] are wrongly coined, or have the wrong number of syllables; and the phrases often involve anachronisms, or, occasionally, plagiarisms.' These last from such recent poets as Dryden and Gray-from the former of whom he boldly stole the line, ‘And tears began to flow; from the latter adapted the conception, 'closed his eyes in endless [everlasting] night.'

Among Chatterton's critics there have been some-Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Rossetti, amongst them-whose precious tributes attest the boy-poet's divinity. No man can tell what Chatterton might have done; what he did do is patent to every one. Had Shakespeare died, or Milton, in his eighteenth year, or even Keats, the world had never heard of their existence. But he, a lad, with chances vastly less than theirs, had by then written his name so high in Fame's temple that purblind pilgrims must accept his achievement on hearsay. If he had lived to be famous, the fraud of the 'poet-priest Rowley' would not, belike, have been more hardly blamed than that of Jedediah Cleishbotham.' As it is, the conscientious critics have found it less difficult to dilate on Chatterton's pride and scepticism, his vices and deceit-nay, on the meteorology of 1770, than to master the difficult Rowleyan dialect, and to gauge the genius of this nursling of mediavalism, this harbinger of the Renascence of Wonder, to use Mr Theodore Watts-Dunton's definition of the neo-Romantic movement. For Mr Watts-Dunton it was reserved to point out Chatterton's metrical inventiveness, and his 'undeniable influence, both as to spirit and as to form, upon the revival in the nineteenth century of the romantic temper-that temper, without which English poetry can scarcely perhaps hold a place at all when challenged in a court of universal criticism. . . . As a youthful poet showing that power of artistic self-effacement which is generally found to be incompatible with the eager energies of poetic youth-as a producer, that is to say, of work purely artistic and in its highest reaches unadulterated by lyric egotism-the author of the Rowley Poems (if we leave out of consideration

the acknowledged poems), however inferior to Keats in point of sheer beauty, stands alongside him in our literature, and stands with him alone.'

The Prophecy, a Political Satire.
This truth of old was sorrow's friend-
'Times at the worst will surely mend.'
The difficulty's then to know
How long Oppression's clock can go;
When Britain's sons may cease to sigh,
And hope that their redemption's nigh. . .
When vile Corruption's brazen face
At council-board shall take her place;
And lords and commoners resort
To welcome her at Britain's court;
Look up, ye Britons! cease to sigh,
For your redemption draweth nigh.

See Pension's harbour, large and clear,
Defended by St Stephen's pier!
The entrance safe, by current led,
Tiding round G[rafton]'s jetty head;
Look up, ye Britons! cease to sigh,
For your redemption draweth nigh.

When civil power shall snore at ease,
While soldiers fire--to keep the peace;
When murders sanctuary find,
And petticoats can Justice blind;
Look up, ye Britons! cease to sigh,
For your redemption draweth nigh.

Commerce o'er Bondage will prevail,
Free as the wind that fills her sail.
When she complains of vile restraint,
And Power is deaf to her complaint;
Look up, ye Britons! cease to sigh,
For your redemption draweth nigh.

When at Bute's feet poor Freedom lies,
Marked by the priest for sacrifice,
And doomed a victim for the sins
Of half the outs and all the ins;
Look up, ye Britons! cease to sigh,
For your redemption draweth nigh.

When time shall bring your wish about,
Or seven-years lease you sold, is out;
No future contract to fulfil;
Your tenants holding at your will;
Raise up your heads! your right demand-
For your redemption 's in your hand.

Then is your time to strike the blow,
And let the slaves of Mammon know,
Britain's true sons a bribe can scorn,
And die as free as they were born.
Virtue again shall take her seat,
And your redemption stand completę.

Bristowe Tragedie, or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin.

The feathered songster, Chanticleer,

Has wound his bugle-horn,
And told the early villager

The coming of the morn:

Then Master Canynge sought the king,
And fell down on his knee;

'I'm come,' quoth he, unto your grace,
To move your clemency.'

'Then,' quoth the king, 'your tale speak out,
You have been much our friend;
Whatever your request may be,
We will to it attend.'

'My noble liege! all my request
Is for a noble knight,

Who, though mayhap he has done wrong,
He thought it still was right.

'He has a spouse and children twain ;
All ruined are for aye,

If that you are resolved to let
Charles Bawdin die to-day.'

'Speak not of such a traitor vile,'
The king in fury said;
'Before the evening star doth shine,
Bawdin shall lose his head.

'By Mary, and all saints in heaven,
This sun shall be his last!'
Then Canynge dropped a briny tear,
And from the presence passed.

With heart brimful of gnawing grief,
He to Sir Charles did go,

And sat him down upon a stool,

And tears began to flow.

'We all must die,' quoth brave Sir Charles; 'What boots it how or when?

Death is the sure, the certain fate

Of all we mortal men.

'Say why, my friend, thy honest soul Runs over at thine eye;

Is it for my most welcome doom
That thou dost child-like cry?'

Quoth godly Canynge: I do weep,
That thou so soon must die,
And leave thy sons and helpless wife;
'Tis this that wets mine eye.'

'Then dry the tears that out thine eye From godly fountains spring;

Death I despise, and all the power

Of Edward, traitor-king.

When through the tyrant's welcome means
I shall resign my life,

The God I serve will soon provide
For both my sons and wife.

'Before I saw the lightsome sun,

This was appointed me ; Shall mortal man repine or grudge

What God ordains to be?

'How oft in battle have I stood,

When thousands died around; When smoking streams of crimson blood Imbrued the fattened ground:

'How did I know that every dart
That cut the airy way,
Might not find passage to my heart,
And close mine eyes for aye?

'And shall I now, for fear of death,
Look wan and be dismayed?
Nay! from my heart fly childish fear;
Be all the man displayed. . . .

'My honest friend, my fault has been
To serve God and my prince;
And that I no time-server am,
My death will soon convince.

'In London city was I born,

Of parents of great note; My father did a noble arms Emblazon on his coat. . . .

'He taught me justice and the laws With pity to unite ;

And eke he taught me how to know The wrong cause from the right.

'And none can say but all my life

I have his wordès kept,

And summed the actions of the day
Each night before I slept.

'What though I on a sledge be drawn, And mangled by a hind,

I do defy the traitor's power;
He cannot harm my mind:
'What though, uphoisted on a pole,
My limbs shall rot in air,
And no rich monument of brass
Charles Bawdin's name shall bear ;

'Yet in the holy book above,

Which time can't eat away,
There with the servants of the Lord
My name shall live for aye.

King Edward's soul rushed to his face,
He turned his head away,

And to his brother Gloucester
He thus did speak and say:

To him that so-much-dreaded death
No ghastly terrors bring;
Behold the man! he spake the truth;
He's greater than a king!'

'So let him die!' Duke Richard said ; 'And may each one our foes Bend down their necks to bloody axe, And feed the carrion crows.'

And now the horses gently drew

Sir Charles up the high hill; The axe did glister in the sun, His precious blood to spill.

Sir Charles did up the scaffold go,

As up a gilded car

Of victory, by valorous chiefs
Gained in the bloody war.

And to the people he did say :
'Behold you see me die,
For serving loyally my king,

My king most rightfully.

'As long as Edward rules this land,
No quiet you will know ;
Your sons and husbands shall be slain,
And brooks with blood shall flow.

'You leave your good and lawful king,

When in adversity;

Like me, unto the true cause stick,

And for the true cause die.'

Then he, with priests, upon his knees, A prayer to God did make, Beseeching him unto himself

His panting soul to take.

Then, kneeling down, he laid his head
Most seemly on the block;
Which from his body fair at once

The able headsman struck. . .

Thus was the end of Bawdin's fate:
God prosper long our king,
And grant he may, with Bawdin's soul,
In heaven God's mercy sing!

The Minstrel's Song in 'Ella.' O sing unto my roundelay;

O drop the briny tear with me ;
Dance no more on holiday,
Like a running river be;
My love is dead,

Gone to his death-bed,
All under the willow-tree.

Black his hair as the winter night,

White his neck as the summer snow, Red his face as the morning light, Cold he lies in the grave below: My love is dead,

Gone to his death-bed,

All under the willow-tree.