How feelingly, and with what individuality, he describes the universal love for the Robin; and surely we are not wrong in attributing an accent of especial pathos to the last two lines we quote: How many are the lowly minds That hear and welcome thee anew; Not taste alone, but humble hinds Delight to see and praise thee too. The veriest clown beside his cart The maiden marked at day's decline, It was Isaac Taylor, we believe, who said upon the appearance of Clare's first volume, that "no poet of our country has shown than greater ability, under circumstances so hostile to its development." We believe this is as true now as then, although we have in our recollection the strong and beautiful instances of Robet Nicoll, and Thomas Miller, Gerald Massey, and many other names we mention with love and honour. No writer of English verse, of whom we have any knowledge, ever fought a way from an obscurity so utterly pitiable, hopeless, and wretched. As to Burns, his circumstances are not for a moment to be mentioned as 'Tis wrong that thou should'st be despised, When these gay, fickle birds appear; They sing when Summer flowers prized Thou art the dull and dying year. Well! let the heedless and the gay are lowly by the side of Clare's; with a thorough Scotch education, which implied some knowledge of Latin and Greek, and a home in a Scotch farm, and a birthplace amidst the mountain majesties and stern grandeurs of the North, what parallel could be drawn with such an education as that we have discribed - with such an early home, and with a birthplace certainly not especially calculated to give poetic inspiration? most outcast and despised, most ungratefully Most unhappy, most life-long wretched, treated of all the lowly children of song! As we write this article there lie before us, not only Mr. Martin's biography, but we have taken down from our bookshelves, we believe, all the volumes Clare ever published. We have read his life, and renewed our old impressions with those volumes before us. As a poet and writer their author ought to have met with a better fate, and to have received a more kindly notice, but we trust the fate of this man may be a warning to scare away all youth from the preserves of poetry. We have taken down these volumes because we believe that justice has never been awarded to them, yet FOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. I. 2. smile She's my playmate in leisure, my comfort in There the short-pasture grass hides the lark on toil; they would form a sweet volume of rural | There Peace comes to me - I have faith in her verses if any publisher could be induced to bear the responsibility of their publication; far inferior verses have secured a permanent place in our language. Poetry of tenderness, and of home, of pensive reflection, and of natural description, do not all combine in the following? - called its nest, Though scarcely so high as the grasshopper's And there its moss-ball hides the wild honey-bee, Far away from the world, its delusions and There are some look on cities like stones in a wall Nothing more. There are others, Ambition's proud heirs, Of whom I have neither the courage nor cares. So I sit on my bench, or enjoy in the shade It would be too much to expect that all the pages of our peasant poet have an equal beauty and purity of verse and description. He wrote very much he wrote to find corresponding verse for his ideas. too much. It was remarkably easy to him Sometimes the ear is offended by too homely an expression, but the sense is usually strong and clear, and the imagery is delicate and perfect. He is a true painterhe cannot be called a severe one; in spite of his tender nature and his many sorrows, Joys come like the grass in the fields springing a cheerful and subdued glow of happy light plays over his pages. He had, whatever else was wanting, the sense to write Though low my lot, my wish is won, To fate I live resigned; I have a friend I value here, While yet he read small incidents by the bright light of truth and instruction, as when he writes, ON AN INFANT KILLED BY LIGHTNING. As fearless as a cherub's rest, Up, at the lightning's fearful flash, The tender mother stayed her breath To think the thing that brought its death Well might she shriek when it turned pale, And yet it smiled in clay. O woman! the dread storm was given It took thy infant pure to heaven, Of course it was in him also to find the pensive teachings of nature and of time; and change, as many of his verses especially bear testimony, touched him by its sad autumn hues of surprise and fear. Are there not many who will be able to receive the impression cast by such verses as — DECAY. O Poesy is on the wane, For Fancy's visions all unfitting; I hardly know her face again, Nature herself seems on the flitting. The fields grow old and common things, The grass, the sky, the winds a-blowing; And spots, where still a beauty clings, Are sighing "going! all a-going!" O Poesy is on the wane, I hardly know her face again. The bank with brambles overspread, With paths of gravel finely clouted; I sat beside the pasture stream, To pledge her health in draughts divine; Smiles made it nectar from the sky, Love turned e'en water into wine. O Poesy is on the wane, I cannot find her face again. The sun those mornings used to find, Its clouds were other-country mountains, And heaven looked downward on the mind, Like groves, and rocks, and mottled fountains. Those heavens are gone, the mountains grey, O Poesy is on the wane, Nor love nor joy is mine again. Love's sun went down without a frown, I often think the West is gone, I cannot find her haunte again. Mere withered stalks and fading trees, And pastures spread with hills and rushes, Are all my fading vision sees; Gone, gone are rapture's flooding gushes! When mushrooms they were fairy bowers, Their marble pillars over-swelling, And Danger paused to pluck the flowers, That in their swarthy rings were dwelling. Yes, Poesy is on the wane, Nor joy, nor fear is mine again. Aye, Poesy hath passed away, And Fancy's visions undeceive us; The night hath ta'en the place of day, And why should passing shadows grieve us. I thought the flowers upon the hill Were flowers from Adam's open gardens; But I have had my summer thrills, And I have had my heart's rewardings. So Poesy is on the wane, I hardly know her face again. And Friendship it hath burned away, O could I feel her faith again! And now we close our notice of a departed, neglected, forgotten poet; we have devoted so much space to his name, feeling that we, perhaps, fulfil the hope, already to Earl Fitzwilliam, we are quite aware quoted from his first volume: Yet when I'm dead, let's hope I have Some friend in store, as I'm to thee, That will find out my lowly grave, And heave a sigh to notice me. The extracts we have made will be at once an appendix to Mr. Martin's volume, while they will justify our own wish expressed above, that he had somewhat enlarged his book, and increased its value by comprehending within it a general selection from the now-forgotten, unnoticed, and, we suppose, never-to-be-reprinted, writings of the poor peasant. Finally, we trust that, in whatever circumstances the poor poet closed his eyes and days, we have shown that they judged rightly who demurred to, and departed from, Earl Fitzwilliam's stern verdict for leaving him to lie in a pauper's grave; and we shall be glad if his faithful old friend, the Rev. Mr. Mossop, the excellent, amiable, and admirable vicar of Helpston-in whose study we, sixteen years ago, received a number of the first painful particulars of Clare's life with other friends, shall be able to rear some modest monumental stone in place of the nameless mound beneath the sycamoretree. We suppose that Helpston never produced anything very remarkable before; and Northamptonshire, though rich in peers, has not been so fertile in genius that she can afford to forget even so lowly a singer. As that from his ancestors Clare had received much of that order of kindness which, while it confers, never forgets to glove the hand in conferring. We are aware, too, that Clark was a pensioner on Earl Fitzwilliam's estate, by the arrangements of the preceding earl, when he died. It looks as though he were very glad to find a pensioner struck from his roll. Should this poor notice meet his eye, we will respectfully commend to him certain lines written by the poor lunatic himself, in one of those lucid intervals of sublimity and beauty-lines suggested, we suppose, by some such ruggedness of behaviour as that with which he treated the venerable corpse of the Northamptonshire peasant. THE MODESTY OF GREAT MEN. And more like common men than others are. Time mellows fruit, and suns bring on the flowers; And greatness lives with kindness in all hours; But Pride is ever Low and will deride- IN France a dead body must be buried within twenty-four hours of decease, and a petition has recently been presented to the Senate praying that the time should be enlarged to forty-eight hours. Cardinal Donnet supported the petition, mentioned several cases of premature interment, and related a story which produced a profound sensation. A young priest in the summer of 1826 fainted in the pulpit and was given up for dead. He was laid out, examined, and pronounced dead, the Bishop reciting the De Profundis while the coffin was preparing for the body. All this while, and deep into the night, the "body," though motionless, heard all that was going on in an agony of mind impossible to describe. At last a friend known to the "deceased " from infancy came in, his voice aroused some dormant power, and next day the corpse was again preaching from the pulpit. The sufferer was the venerable Cardinal then telling the tale, and in spite of official resistance the Senate voted that the petition should be referred to the Minister of the Interior for action. The idea of the French authorities is, that as the living and the dead are among the poor forced to remain in the same room, interment cannot be delayed, but twenty-four hours is a horribly short space of time in a country where it is not sufficient to produce any symptom of corruption.-Spectator, 3 March. From Blackwood's Magazine. mass. The few, indeed, do care, who canA RELIGIOUS NOVEL. not help appealing as they read to their own experience. Anomalies perplex them; it is more than their fancy can accomplish to picture gentlemen and dustmen on terms of absolute equality, and interchanging ideas permanently, over the same dinnertable. But this defiance of fact in some form or other is a positive charm with the many; it is an exception to find any fiction widely and with all classes popular without Ir must always remain an open question how far the literature of an age represents the manners of that age. First impressions uniformly take for granted that it does. People jump to the conclusion that a man of genius would never portray a state of things foreign to his reader's experience, and unverified by his own observation, as actually existing; because any other assump-it. We have, no doubt, some few trustwortion is supposed to cast a slur at once on the writer's truth of perception, if not his honesty, and on his readers' common sense; who, by their approval, would seem to affix their seal to a false presentment for themselves, under no assignable temptation to do so. Yet how little ground we have for this plausible theory! which, if we come to think of it, supposes the authors of past times to be a different sort of people altogether from the popular writers of our own day; and our great-great-grandfathers jealous for truth in a way beyond any example we can show. thy delineations, but they are none of them popular in the full triumphant sense of the term; or on this account mainly: so little is truth to our experience the one great desideratum we are sometimes disposed to think it. Our conclusion, therefore, is, that we may not trust pictures of manners of any day without large reservations, and constant reference to our own notions of nature and probability; taking into account the universal attraction of the exceptional over the commonplace. We see that the most profound study of men and society constantly does no more than provide a plausible home for impossible creations, or help a man to personify his own various qualities and propensities; his sympathies possessing each by turn; all the personages talking his talk in different moods; as his separate faults or virtues, opinions or qualities, assert themselves, and take the lead. It appears to us that, in assuming the writers of a former age to have even aimed at representing existing manners according to any matter-of-fact experience, we run counter to the teaching of our own eyes. In all the infinite varieties of life depicted by the volumes of the circulating library, when do we come upon anything like what But books which do not represent society we have ourselves seen and heard, more es- as it is, or ever was, may yet have a powerpecially in those works which are most ea- ful influence on manners. They may indigerly devoured by the widest, most various cate what things are going to be, and forecircles of readers? What echo, what re- shadow the changes time is on the eve of sponse, does our own experience give back? working. The novel which portrays manWhen a future generation judges us by Mr. ners and modes of action preposterous to Dickens's animated pictures of life, or by our observation may, if it is powerfully the works of such lesser luminaries as written, bring about its verification by hitCharles Reade or Wilkie Collins, on the ting the fancy of a class open to new imground of their universal acceptance, they pressions, and impatient of present rewill have the same reason for their opinion straints. An undisciplined fancy may imagwhich satisfies us of the truth of many a ine things for which it has small warrant picture of past society, and which prompted and no general example, yet only anticisome of Macaulay's most telling representa- pate: planting seeds which shall bear fruit tions. Yet, conspicuous as is the genius of in another generation, and suggesting to the first, and able as are the other two, re- untutored fancies possibilities before ungard their works as being really what they dreamt of. Most fiction is founded either profess to be-pictures of English social on some moral ideal, and is a glorification life and how grotesque, distorted, and ab- of what has been, but which has never been solutely and ridiculously improbable one seen by the writer's bodily eyes; or it picand all are! What a masquerade-like jum- tures his wishes and testifies to his impable of ranks and degrees what impossible tience of some form of bondage. Very few combinations in some, what impossible cours- people find enough in the actual, in the es of action in others! And for all this mere interest of delineating men and wowho cares, so long as they are amused? men as they see them, to induce them to The majority mind no more being misrep- the intense intellectual labour of absolute resented in the mass than abused in the elaborate truth of portraiture, stroke for |