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EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) was Boston, Massachusetts. His father and mother were actors, and they both died in the same week at Richmond when Edgar was but two years old.

He was adopted by a kind-hearted Richmond merchant named Allan, who sent him to England to a school in Stoke Newington. On returning to America he entered the University of Virginia, but he grew up a wild reckless youth, and frequently brought discredit on himself and his patron. They quarrelled and parted, and for two years Poe lived with an aunt at Baltimore, whose daughter, Virginia, he afterwards married.

In 1830 he was reconciled to Mr. Allan, and was admitted to the Military Academy of West Point; but again he was guilty of misconduct and was expelled, and a final rupture between him and Mr. Allan took place.

He was

The last seventeen years of his life were spent in writing tales and poems for the reviews and magazines. married to his cousin in 1835, and her early death helped to darken the melancholy which pervades nearly all his work. The poems Annabel Lee and Ülalume seem especially to be reminiscences of his dead wife.

WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED (1802-1839) was the son of a serjeant-at-law, and was born in Bedford Row, London. He was educated at Eton, and was one of the most brilliant scholars there.

With several schoolfellows he started a magazine called The Etonian, which ran from October 1820 to July 1821, and which contains some of Praed's finest poems. Two of them, Reminiscences of my Youth and Surly Hall, are good examples of his genial and graceful style.

The publisher of the magazine was Charles Knight, who formed the highest opinion of Praed's powers, and speaks of his 'kindness that lurks under sarcasm, and the wisdom that wears the mask of fun.'

From Eton, Praed went to Cambridge and became, with Macaulay and others, a contributor to Knight's Quarterly Magazine.

After leaving the University he was called to the Bar and became a member of Parliament. Had his life not been cut short, he would probably have had a distinguished public

career.

Two volumes of his poems have been published, and The Red Fisherman bears the date 1820.

SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832) was born in the Old Town' of Edinburgh. When he was an infant he was afflicted with lameness, and for health's sake he was sent away to his grandfather's pastoral farm at Sandy Knowe, and his earliest recollections were of the beautiful Borderland which he always loved so well.

At the age of fifteen Scott was apprenticed to his father, who was a Writer to the Signet, and in 1792 he was called to the Bar. But literature far more than law engaged his affections, and he gave himself almost entirely to it after gaining the post of Sheriff of Selkirkshire in 1799. His earliest publications were translations from the German, and in 1802 the first two volumes of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border appeared.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel, his first great original poem, appeared in 1805, Marmion in 1808, and The Lady of the Lake in 1810. Other poems followed in later years, and in 1814 the noble series of his prose romances opened with Waverley. Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian and others followed in quick succession, and Scott was loaded with wealth and fame. His later years were embittered by the financial ruin which fell upon him on the collapse of the publishing house in which he was a partner.

Some of Scott's finest little songs are embedded in his larger works thus Proud Maisie is the dying song of Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Midlothian, and Young Lochinvar is sung by Lady Heron in Marmion.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) was born at Stratford-on-Avon. His father was a small farmer, and William, after receiving a scanty education at the Grammar School, appears to have worked with his father till about 1586, when he came to London to seek his fortune, leaving a wife and children at home with his father and mother.

In 1589 Shakespeare's name appears in a list of sixteen players and sharers in the Blackfriars Playhouse, and here his earliest plays, Henry VI., Love's Labour's Lost, and others, were performed.

A few years later he gained the notice and friendship of the young Earl of Southampton, and dedicated to him the two beautiful poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Year by year Shakespeare continued to prosper, and he visited Stratford every year and bought a house and land, and looked forward to a time of peaceful retirement there.

The order in which Shakespeare's plays were composed

cannot now be determined, but it is thought that most of the comedies and the plays from English history were written before 1600; while the great tragedies, Lear, Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth, were written after, as were also the Roman plays. The Winter's Tale and the Tempest are two of his very latest works, and Henry VIII. is only his in part.

There are many sweet gems of song scattered through his plays, and some of the most delightful are in these two latest plays.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) was born at Field Place, near Horsham, and belonged to a wealthy family in Sussex. He was a dreamy, enthusiastic boy, who took little share in school sports, and was passionately fond of reading and of experimental science.

He was educated at Eton and Oxford, but was expelled from the University with one of his companions in 1811, because he had composed and disseminated a pamphlet advocating Atheism. He then quarrelled with his father; made a runaway match with a school fellow of his sisters'; crossed over to Dublin to rouse the Irish on the subject of Catholic Emancipation, and committed other foolish youthful indis

cretions.

Shelley's first considerable poem was Alastor, written in 1815 near Windsor Forest. Two years later he wrote a long poem, The Revolt of Islam, and in the next year he left England for the last time.

During the next few years he lived chiefly at Pisa, and there his greatest works, The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Adonais, were written. The last of these is an eloquent lament over the untimely death of Keats. His finest lyrics, To a Skylark, The Cloud, and others, also belong to this time. The poem called The Recollection belongs to the year of his death.

The poet was drowned in a storm which arose when he was returning from visiting his old friend Leigh Hunt, at Pisa, in July 1822.

JAMES SHIRLEY (1596-1666) was the last of the great band of dramatists who immediately followed Shakespeare. He was intended for the Church, but became a Roman Catholic, and supported himself for a time as a schoolmaster. In 1625 he wrote a lively comedy, Love Tricks, and he then came to London and wrote more than thirty plays before the closing of the theatres in 1642.

The best of his plays is The Lady of Pleasure, but no one

of them is of very great merit. The one excellent thing by which Shirley is remembered is the noble song,

'The glories of our birth and state,'

which occurs in the play, The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses. After the closing of the theatres Shirley again took to teaching, and he also published three small volumes of poems and

masques.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-1586) was born at Penshurst, in Kent, of an ancient and honourable family. He was educated at Shrewsbury and Oxford; then he went abroad and witnessed the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and, after visiting Germany and Italy, he was back at the English Court in 1575.

He fell in love with the Lady Penelope Devereux, the daughter of the Earl of Essex, but, unhappily, the match came to nothing, and a few years later she was married to Lord Rich. Sidney gave expression to his grief in a series of over a hundred beautiful sonnets which are entitled Astrophel and Stella. sonnets so fine had yet appeared in English literature, and they almost anticipate the beauty of Shakespeare's. The address to the moon, No. XXXI., and the address to sleep, No. XXXIX., are especially fine.

No

In 1580 Sidney was out of favour at Court, and he withdrew to Wilton, the seat of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and there for her diversion he wrote the famous prose romance, Arcadia. The next year he wrote another fine work, the Apology for Poetrie, in opposition to Stephen Gosson, who was fiercely attacking Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwealth.'

In 1584 English troops were sent to help the Dutch in their struggle for freedom. Sidney went with them, and fell fighting at Zutphen in September 1586.

ROBERT SURTEES (1779-1834) was a country gentleman of fine antiquarian tastes, who lived at Mainsforth, in the County of Durham. In 1806 he began to correspond with Sir Walter Scott, who was gathering materials for a new edition of the Border Minstrelsy.

The poem, Barthram's Dirge, is enclosed in a letter sent to Scott in November 1809, and Surtees gives this account of it: The following romantic fragment I have from the imperfect recitation of Ann Douglas, a withered crone, who weeds in my garden.' It appears to be founded on an old North Country legend of a gallant who was slain by seven brothers in revenge for his treatment of their sister.

In Note M to the first canto of Marmion Scott gives another old ballad which had been contributed by his friend Surtees. There is, however, no doubt that both these ballads were composed by Surtees, though Scott believed them to be genuine relics of antiquity.

The great work of Surtees' life was The History of the County of Durham, in four folio volumes. The last volume was published after his death, and it contains an interesting memoir of his life and further specimens of his poetry.

Within a few months of his death the 'Surtees Antiquarian Society' was founded by more than a hundred gentlemen of the Northern counties, and many interesting remains of antiquity have been published by them.

CHARLES WOLFE (1791-1823) was born in Dublin; was educated at Trinity College, and became a clergyman in the Irish Church. The single poem on which his fame rests was written while he was a student, and was published in an Irish newspaper, the Newry Telegraph, in 1817.

The poem secured instant notice and popularity, and was copied and recopied into paper after paper. It was signed only with the letters "C. W.," and there were many guesses as to the authorship. In 1841 a false claim was raised by some other person, but Wolfe's friends decisively vindicated his claim to

the honour.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850) was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland. His father, who was a solicitor with moderate means, died when William was thirteen, but his uncles sent him to Cambridge in 1787.

During one of the college vacations Wordsworth went with a friend on a walking tour through France and Switzerland, and he welcomed with enthusiasm the apparent dawning of freedom in the former country. The story of this part of his life is beautifully told in a long poem called The Recluse, which was not published till after the poet's death.

In 1795 Wordsworth settled, with his sister Dora, at Racedown, in Dorset, and devoted himself to his life's work. Two years later they moved into Somerset and became neighbours of Coleridge, and in 1798 the famous Lyrical Ballads were published. The two finest poems in the volume are Wordsworth's Lines composed above Tintern Abbey and Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.

In 1798 Wordsworth and his sister went to Germany, and there he wrote Lucy Gray and several other of his finest minor poems. They returned in 1798 and settled at Grasmere, in Westmoreland, where the poet spent the rest of his long life.