Duc d'Orleans. But, assuredly, it was not in imitation of the Regent he chose his own wife for the principal subject of his ditties. In the same manner, and in the same worthy spirit of imitation of the same worthy person, he tried hard to be a libertine, and laid siege to the virtue of sundry maids of honour; preferring all the time, in his inmost soul, his own wife to the handsomest among her attendants. His flirtations with Lady Archibald Hamilton and Miss Vane had not half the grace or sincerity of some of his effusions to the Princess, whom he tenderly loved, and used to call, with a sort of pastoral gallantry, ma Sylvie." One of his songs has been preserved by that delicious retailer of court-gossip, Horace Walpole; and I copy it from the Appendix to his Memoirs, without agreeing in his flippant censure. 66 SONG. 'Tis not the languid brightness of thine eyes, Nor those fair heavenly arches which arise O'er each of them, to shade their light : "Tis not that hair which plays with every wind, And loves to wanton o'er thy face, Now straying o'er thy forehead, now behind Retiring with insidious grace: "Tis not the living colours over each, By Nature's finest pencil wrought, To shame the fresh-blown rose and blooming peach, And mock the happiest painter's thought; But 'tis that gentle mind, that ardent love So kindly answering my desire, That grace with which you look, and speak, and move! That thus have set my soul on fire. To Dr. Parnell's* love for his wife (Anne Minchin), we owe two of the most charming songs in our language; "My life hath been so wondrous free," and that most beautiful lyric, "When your beauty appears," which, as it is less known, I give entire, When your beauty appears In its graces and airs, All bright as an angel new dropt from the skies, At distance I gaze, and am aw'd by my fears, So strangely you dazzle my eyes. Born in Dublin, 1679; died 1717. But when without art, Your kind thoughts you impart, When your love runs in blushes through every vein; When it darts from your eyes, when it pants at your heart, Then I know that you're woman again. "There's a passion and pride, In our sex," she replied; "And thus, might I gratify both, I would do, Still an angel appear to each lover beside, But still be a woman for you!" This amiable and beloved wife died after a union of five or six years, and left her husband broken-hearted. Her sweetness and loveliness, and the general sympathy caused by her death, drew a touch of deep feeling from the pen of Swift, who mentions the event in his journal to Stella: every one, he says, grieved for her husband, 66 they were so happy together." Poor Parnell did not, in his bereavement, try Lord Lyttelton's specifics: he did not write an elegy, nor a monody, nor did he marry again;—and, unfortunately for himself, he could not subdue his mind to religious resignation. His grief and his nervous irritability proved too much for his reason he felt what all have felt under the influence of piercing anguish,—a dread, a horror of being left alone: he flew to society; when that was not at hand, he sought relief from excesses which his constitution would not bear, and died, unhappy man! in the prime of life; "a martyr," as Goldsmith tells us, "to conjugal fidelity." 154 CHAPTER X. CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED. KLOPSTOCK AND META. THEN is there not the German Klopstock and his Meta,—his lovely, devoted, angelic Meta? As the subject of some of her husband's most delightful and popular poems, both before and after her marriage,—when living, she formed his happiness on earth; and when, as he tenderly imagined, she watched over his happiness from heaven-how pass her lightly over in a work like this? Yet how do her justice, but by borrowing her own sweet words? or referring the reader at once to the memoirs and fragments of her letters, which never saw the light till sixty years after her death?-for in her there was no vain-glory, no effort, no display. A feeling so hallowed lingers round the memory of |