On his return to England he became editor of the New Monthly Magazine, and in it appeared the poem, Miss Kilmansegg, which many regard as his masterpiece. The Song of the Shirt, another famous piece, appeared in the Christmas number of Punch, 1843.

BEN JONSON (1573-1637) was the greatest of the companions of Shakespeare. He was born in London of poor parentage, and served as a soldier in the Netherlands. At about the age of twenty he settled in London, and became an actor and a writer of plays.

His first great play, Every Man in his Humour, was brought out in 1598, and Shakespeare himself was one of the actors. Within the next sixteen years Jonson wrote nine or ten other plays, and four of these, The Alchemist, Volpone, The Silent Woman, and Bartholomew Fair, are justly regarded as masterpieces. Some six or eight other plays were written by him in later years, but they are of inferior merit.

During these years Jonson also wrote a number of masques for Court festivals. The fashion had been introduced from Italy, and King James took special delight in them. The king

and queen took part in the acting, and Inigo Jones devised the scenery and decorations. Some of Jonson's finest lyrics are scattered in these masques, the Hymn to Diana being in Cynthia's Revels.

In 1818 Jonson went on foot to Scotland to visit the home of his ancestors, and he returned the next year. An interesting, but rather meagre, menorial of his conversation while in Scot. land has been preserved by Drummond of Hawthornden.

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) was born in Finsbury, where his father was a livery stable keeper. He was educated at a school at Enfield, and is described by some of his schoolfellows as a youth of great beauty and of enthusiastic nature. He was passionately fond of Spenser 'his countenance would light up at each rich expression, and his strong frame would tremble with emotion as he read.' He learnt no Greek at school, but Chapman's translation of Homer yielded him intense pleasure, which he has expressed in the finest of all his fine sonnets. After leaving school he was apprenticed to a surgeon, but he soon gave up medicine for literature, and became a friend and companion of Leigh Hunt.

In 1818 he published Endymion, which was very severely treated by the reviewers, but which is now recognised as a poem of rare, though immature, genius. Two years later another volume of poems was published containing, among others, The

Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, and Hyperion. The last is but a fragment, but Byron said it seemed actually inspired by the Titans, and as sublime as Eschylus.'

In The Eve of St. Agnes mention is made of

'An ancient ditty, long since mute,

In Provence called, La belle dame sans mercy,'

and Keats has expanded this into a sad but beautiful ballad, which he has made the vehicle for expressing the desolation of his own unrequited love.

Meanwhile the young poet was dying of consumption. Shelley begged him to come to Italy, and in 1820 he sailed. He died in Rome the next year.

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) was born in the Inner Temple, where his father occupied some humble post. He was a schoolfellow at Christ's Hospital with Coleridge, and continued his friend through life.

In 1792 he obtained a post in the service of the East India Company, and retired on a comfortable pension in 1825. His first essay in literature was in 1795, when he joined with Coleridge and Lloyd in writing a volume of poems. Rosamund Gray appeared the next year, and the drama of John Woodvil in 1802, but these works were of little merit.

In 1823 he published the delightful Essays of Elia, on which his fame now rests. They are filled with quaint and delicate humour, and Lamb shows himself a worthy fellow of Steele, Addison, and Goldsmith.

Mary Lamb was ten years older than her brother Charles, and outlived him twelve years. There was a taint of madness in the family, and in 1796 Mary, in a sudden fit of madness, killed her mother. Until her father's death she was confined in an asylum, and then she was released on her brother Charles undertaking to be surety for her. They were fondly attached to each other, and in 1807 they published as their joint work the pleasant Tales from Shakespere. Mary Lamb also wrote Poetry for Children and Mrs. Leicester's School.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864) was the eldest son of a gentleman of ancient family in Warwickshire. He was a youth of impulsive and stubborn temper, and at Rugby and at Oxford was frequently in trouble with his superiors.

In 1795 he published a small volume of poems, but his first considerable poem, Gebir, was published anonymously three years later. It was a strange Oriental tale of war and magic, and it was greatly admired by Southey and Shelley and Lamb, but it never became popular.

The subject of the story was suggested by a volume of romance lent him by a friend, Rose Aylmer, the daughter of Lord Aylmer. When, a few years later, this lady died in India, Landor wrote the beautiful little elegy Rose Aylmer, which Charles Lamb was never tired of repeating.

In 1812 he published a tragedy, Count Julian; but this, like Gebir, failed to win popular favour. But some ten or twelve years later Landor had found where his real strength lay, and the Imaginary Conversations, which appeared in 1824, gained instant recognition and favour. All kinds of characters appear in these dialogues, old Greeks and Romans, Italian poets, English kings and queens, statesmen, philosophers, and poets, and the style gives some of the best examples of English prose. Other volumes appeared at intervals, and before his death Landor had written nearly 150 of these dialogues.

LADY ANNE LINDSAY OF BALCARRAS (17501825) was the authoress of the pathetic ballad of Auld Robin Gray, though the secret of the authorship was known only to a few before the lady's death.

Sir Walter Scott, in 1825, edited the first authentic edition of the poem, and in the preface gives many interesting particulars from a letter written to him in 1823 by the authoress.

The poem is named from Robin Gray, the herd at Balcarras, but the story itself is quite fictitious. There was an ancient Scotch melody, the lady tells us, of which she was passionately fond, but the words of the song as sung by old Sophie Johnstone were indelicate, and she longed to sing old Sophie's air to different words.

She wrote the song in 1772, and it became a favourite throughout the district, and antiquaries disputed as to whether it belonged to the sixteenth or eighteenth century.

Many years afterwards she wrote a continuation or second part, to please her aged mother, who said, 'Anny, I wish you would tell me how that unlucky business of Jenny and Jamie ended.' This second part lacks, however, the simple pathos of the first.

WADSWORTH

HENRY LONGFELLOW (18071882), the sweetest of American singers, was born at Portland, on the coast of Maine. As a boy he was fond of reading, and the Sketch-Book of Washington Irving was his special delight.

After completing his college course he travelled in Europe for three years, and on his return, in 1829, was appointed a professor, first at his own college and then at the Harvard University.

His first considerable poem, The Psalm of Life, was published in 1838, and it gained immediate popularity, and in the next year he published a volume of poems with the title, Voices of the Night.

In the same year he published his beautiful prose romance Hyperion, which tells the story of his own wanderings through the Rhineland.

A few years later another volume of ballads was published, containing such well-known favourites as The Wreck of the Hesperus, Excelsior, and The Village Blacksmith, and in 1847 Longfellow published his best and sweetest poem, Evangeline.

Longfellow wrote within the next few years The Building of the Ship, one of his most stirring poems, and The Golden Legend, a story of the Middle Ages. Then, in 1855, appeared Hiawatha, a quaint and beautiful poem, descriptive of Indian life.

Longfellow continued to write new poems till the end of his long life.

RICHARD LOVELACE (1618-1658) belonged to a Kentish family. He became a soldier, and was one of the Court poets who surrounded Queen Henrietta Maria. At the age of sixteen he wrote a comedy, The Scholar, and at twentyone a tragedy, The Soldier.

When the troubles with the Parliament broke out, he was committed to prison for presenting a petition on the King's behalf from the loyalists of Kent. It was then he wrote his fine song, To Althea from Prison. He was soon afterwards liberated on a bail of 40,000/., and throughout the war he was a prisoner on parole.

After 1646 he raised a regiment for the French king, and took part in the siege of Dunkirk. In 1648 he returned to England, and was once more thrown into prison.

In the next year he made a collection of his poems, and published them under the title Lucasta (Lux casta) naming them from a lady (Lucy Sacheverell). Little is known of his later years, but it is supposed that he fell into distress, and it is said that he died in a cellar in Long Acre.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859) was the son of Zachary Macaulay, a man of great energy and enterprise, who had been Governor of Sierra Leone and who was greatly interested in negro emancipation.

The son went in due course to Cambridge and was one of the most brilliant orators in the Union Debating Society. With other talented young men of the University, he began to

write in Charles Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and his stirring poem Ivry appeared in 1824, and in the next year he won instant reputation by his article on Milton in the Edinburgh Review. This was the first of a long series of eloquent articles which appeared at intervals during the next twenty years in the Edinburgh Review.

A few years later he entered Parliament, and in 1833 he was appointed a member of the Supreme Council of India and spent four or five years in that distant land.

In 1832 he wrote the noble ballad, The Armada, and after his return from India he spent some time in Italy, and there wrote the beautiful Lays of Ancient Rome. The remaining years of his life were devoted mainly to the writing of his History of England, of which the first volume was published in 1848, the last in 1855. The work remains a fragment.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593) was born in Canterbury. His father was a shoemaker, but the boy was sent to school and college, and took his degree in 1583. Of the next few years of his life nothing certain is known, and some think that he came to London and was an actor, others that he went with Sidney to the wars in the Netherlands.

In 1588 his first great drama, Tamburlaine the Great, was performed. The play is extravagant both in plot and language, but there are passages of splendid poetry in it, and it became immensely popular. Within the next few years three other fine plays, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II., appeared, and Marlowe left fragments of one or two other plays, and also a fine poem, Hero and Leander.

Marlowe is believed to be the author of portions of Henry VI., and his influence can be pretty plainly traced in several of Shakespeare's early plays. The pretty song beginning

'Come live with me and be my love'

is commonly attributed to Shakespeare, but Izaak Walton claims it for Marlowe. Marlowe was a man of wild, reckless life, and he met his death in a tavern brawl in Deptford, in 1593.

ANDREW MARVELL (1621–1678) was the son of a Yorkshire clergyman. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and from 1641 to 1646 he travelled on the Continent.

Some time after 1650 he gained the friendship of Milton, on whose recommendation he was appointed tutor to Cromwell's nephew. In 1657 he was appointed Assistant Latin Secretary under the Government, and in 1658 he became M. P. for Hull, an honour which he retained till his death. From 1663 to 1665