Wetheral

in the world." river Eden, that swift and on declares King Arthur's n its course, and on whose e fairies in forgotten days al powers.

while, and wrote a weird, e, which is not to be found to Dawlish, it is an oldasant lawns, through which the sea. A railway-arch

s rippling rivulet; but in ad invaded Devon, those

to the smooth hard sands;

its lofty rocks of blood

was divinely isolated, a path. Such is one of the

acity for sketching in the

coque

And laugh'd, and loved a
And shrank from Chanc

Sound was his claret-and
Warm was his double al
His partners at the whist-
That he was faultless in

He went to church but on
Yet Dr. Poundtext alwa
An upright man, who stud

And liked to see his frie

Many a rare old crusty bachelor with quaint ideas and pungent misogyny clinging to them. the other day, vicar of Kingst been a great crony of Wordsw this class. He liked children, b Praed's sketch of the Devo

coquette is excellent good:

"I saw her at the county ba There, when the sounds Gave signal sweet in that

Of hands across and dow

which I may call Praed's in erica. Although he died in that an English edition of Meanwhile there had been at as, of the last of which, pubof the fifty copies printed for itmore of Boston, whose acre of making when he was in popularity of Praed in the some measure due to his bearnthrop, an American patrician t there is something in his ich commends itself specially

has found many imitators, successful, but all immensely it, at any rate, to think that copping into oblivion in his 1 adopted him, and would not to perish. This is one of the

sion

his

a la

of t

You

Of al

PRAED'S PRETTY GIRLS.

145

good turns for which I am grateful to our friends across the whale-pool. Indeed, I have a great liking for the Americans, though some of our journals abuse them with stolid pertinacity. They are our best friends, our kinsmen, speaking our own language, sharing our great traditions, loving our immortal writers. Are we to quarrel with men who use the vernacular of Shakespeare? Verily, no. The country wherein Coleridge reigned alone, supreme, was haunted by lady-witches, and traversed by ancient mariners who had shot sacred birds, and inhabited by wrathful old barons with delicious daughters, and occasionally visited by the devil when he wanted to see how his agricultural affairs prospered. But Praed's country is a land less visionary; a region populous with pretty girls of the bluest blood and dressed in the newest fashion. You know the kind :

"The girls who are nice, and who know it;

The girls who are nicer, and don't;

The girls who will flirt with a poet;

The girls who are wiser, and won't."

Of all these pretty pets Praed is perpetual poet laureate.

VOL. II.

K

MRS. HARRIS.

CHARLES DICKENS has left us an immortal Mrs. Harris -a myth of marvellous influence, whose priestess and prophetess was the irrepressible Sairey Gamp. This is not the lady of whom I am now to write. She needs no further biographer. She is the eternal enigma of fiction, and will dwell in mysterious obscurity long after the epitaph on Ælia Lælia Crispis has been explained; long after the sources of the Nile have been mapped; ay, until the Greek kalends. She dwells apart-the bodiless creation of the imaginative brain of Mrs. Gamp.

But the Mrs. Harris of whom I now attempt to give some slight account was a very tangible and palpable personage, who made her mark in the world. What I have to say about her is based on The Letters of the first Earl of Malmesbury, edited by his grandson, the present Earl. Mrs. Harris was the wife of the eccentric and erudite author of Hermes, and mother of one James Harris, whose diplomatic services raised him to the Peerage. Hermes Harris, as students of the last century's obscure literature are aware, was an odd sort of man, with proclivities for metaphysics and music, yet quite able to