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THE VICAR.

Some years ago, ere time and taste
Had turned our parish topsy-turvy,
When Darnel Park was Darnel Waste,
And roads as little known as scurvy,
The man who lost his way, between

St. Mary's Hill and Sandy Thicket,
Was always shown across the green,
And guided to the Parson's wicket.

Back flew the bolt of lissom lath;
Fair Margaret, in her tidy kirtle,
Led the lorn traveller up the path,

Through clean-clipt rows of box and myrtle;
And Don and Sancho, Tramp and Tray,
Upon the parlour steps collected,

Wagged all their tails, and seemed to say'Our master knows you-you're expected.'

Uprose the Reverend Dr. Brown,

Uprose the Doctor's winsome marrow;

The lady laid her knitting down,

Her husband clasped his ponderous Barrow; Whate'er the stranger's caste or creed, Pundit or Papist, saint or sinner,

He found a stable for his steed,

And welcome for himself, and dinner.

If, when he reached his journey's end,
And warmed himself in Court or College,
He had not gained an honest friend

And twenty curious scraps of knowledge,— If he departed as he came,

With no new light on love or liquor,— Good sooth, the traveller was to blame,

And not the Vicarage, nor the Vicar.

His talk was like a stream, which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses :
It slipped from politics to puns,

It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
Beginning with the laws which keep

The planets in their radiant courses, And ending with some precept deep

For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.

He was a shrewd and sound Divine,
Of loud Dissent the mortal terror;
And when, by dint of page and line,

He 'stablished Truth, or startled Error,
The Baptist found him far too deep;

The Deist sighed with saving sorrow; And the lean Levite went to sleep,

And dreamed of tasting pork to-morrow.

His sermon never said or showed

That Earth is foul, that Heaven is gracious,

Without refreshment on the road

From Jerome, or from Athanasius:

And sure a righteous zeal inspired

The hand and head that penned and planned them,

For all who understood admired,

And some who did not understand them.

He wrote, too, in a quiet way,

Small treatises, and smaller verses,

And sage remarks on chalk and clay,

And hints to noble Lords-and nurses;

True histories of last year's ghost,

Lines to a ringlet, or a turban, And trifles for the Morning Post, And nothings for Sylvanus Urban.

He did not think all mischief fair,
Although he had a knack of joking;
He did not make himself a bear,

Although he had a taste for smoking;

And when religious sects ran mad,

He held, in spite of all his learning, That if a man's belief is bad,

It will not be improved by burning.

And he was kind, and loved to sit
In the low hut or garnished cottage,
And praise the farmer's homely wit,

And share the widow's homelier pottage: At his approach complaint grew mild;

And when his hand unbarred the shutter, The clammy lips of fever smiled

The welcome which they could not utter.

He always had a tale for me

Of Julius Caesar, or of Venus; From him I learnt the rule of three, Cat's cradle, leap-frog, and Quae genus: I used to singe his powdered wig, To steal the staff he put such trust in, And make the puppy dance a jig,

When he began to quote Augustine.

Alack the change! in vain I look

For haunts in which my boyhood trifled,

The level lawn, the trickling brook,

The trees I climbed, the beds I rifled:

The church is larger than before;

You reach it by a carriage entry;
It holds three hundred people more,
And pews are fitted up for gentry.

Sit in the Vicar's seat: you'll hear
The doctrine of a gentle Johnian,
Whose hand is white, whose tone is clear,
Whose phrase is very Ciceronian.
Where is the old man laid?-look down,

And construe on the slab before you,

'Hic jacet GVLIELMVS BROWN,

Vir nulla non donandus lauru?

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.

[THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES was born at Rodney Place, Clifton, on the 20th of July, 1803; he was the son of the famous physician Dr. Thomas Beddoes, and nephew of the no less famous Maria Edgeworth. He was educated at Bath, and at the Charterhouse, and entered Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1820. From 1825 to 1846 he resided in Germany and Switzerland. He left England again after a stay of a few months, and died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in the hospital at Basle, Jan. 26, 1849. He published during his lifetime The Improvisatore, 1821, and The Bride's Tragedy, 1822, besides various works in German; after his death appeared Death's Jest Book, 1850, and Poems, 1851.]

It has been the fate of Beddoes to be made the subject of praise and blame exaggerated enough to fill his proud and indifferent spirit, could he revisit the moonlit world of journalism, with a fund of sardonic merriment. He would certainly be the first to see the jest of his being treated as a profoundly original philosophic poet, and probably more amused than annoyed at being confounded with his own

'bodyless child-full of life in the gloom, Crying with frog-voice, "What shall I be?"'

There is certainly nothing vague, nothing misty or dubious about the poetic entity of Beddoes; he has scarcely left a page behind him of which it cannot be said that he alone in recent times could have written it. His own caustic definition of his poetry pronounces it to be 'entertaining, very unamiable, and utterly unpopular.' We may paraphrase this by saying that it is entertaining because so skilful and nervous in style, so full of surprises, and so unconventional in its aspect of life; but unamiable because of its entire indifference to the ordinary interests of life, and unpopular because it deals with passions and events of a wholly foreign and unfamiliar type. Beddoes is in poetry what the Helsche Breughel is in painting. He dedicates himself to the service of Death, not with a brooding

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sense of the terror and shame of mortality, but from a love of the picturesque pageantry of it, the majesty and sombre beauty, the swift, theatrical transitions, the combined elegance and horror that wait upon the sudden decease of monarchs. He was scarcely a born singer; he was a man of consummate natural ability, who chose to walk through the world in the masquerade of a tragic dramatist, and who carried his antique robes so consistently and so skilfully, that at last his artificial presentment was almost as interesting as the real thing would have been, and the mummer himself almost forgot that he was mumming. The reader who carefully analyses his passages of declamatory fancy, is equally startled by the unreality and by the consummate cleverness of the style. The blank verse of Beddoes is always admirable; it was not as a craftsman that so accomplished a personage was likely to fail; it is even more than admirable, it occasionally approaches closer to the grand manner of the Elizabethan iambic movement than almost any modern verse. But under it all there lies no deep murmur of poetry, no ground-swell of momentous music, making itself dimly heard when the march of the lines is silent, none of that wonderful mystery of sound that we catch in the best passages of Webster and Marston, and even of Cyril Tourneur. Beddoes succeeds, in my judgment, much more truly as a songwriter than as a constructor of blank verse. His songs are very plainly modelled upon two types, the one that of Shakespeare and his school, the other that of Shelley. It was no honour to Beddoes, it was merely characteristic of his extraordinary intellectual vigour and perspicacity, that he was the first Englishman, outside the circle of personal friends, to perceive the momentous character of Shelley's genius. In his lyrics he sat at Shelley's feet, always with too much cleverness to fall into the tricks of imitation; and it would perhaps not be very easy to trace the likeness, if he had not unwarily left one palpable specimen of his method in the song 'The swallow leaves her nest,' where the movement of Shelley's verse is borrowed, not adapted. Yet, if we are content to take the best of his songs for what they are worth, as marvellously clever tours de force, they are as enjoyable as purely artificial exercises in verse can ever be.

Beddoes expended thought and labour for four years on the one poem which he meant to be his masterpiece, Death's Fest Book. It is a tragedy of the same class as the Duchess of Malfy and Antonio and Mellida; indeed there are whole scenes which

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