his highest plot to plant the bergamot he recognizes the simple unambitious character of Cromwell's early days: the bergamot is a kind of pear. The bleeding head refers to a supposed event while digging for the foundations of the Capitol at Rome. Climacteric here means deathgiving; this valour sad-serious, in opposition to the changeful policy of the Scots. VAUGHAN. Silex Scintillans: "sacred poems and private ejaculations," 1650. The Epithalamium is from Olor Iscanus, "a collection of select poems and translations, by Henry Vaughan, Silurist," 1651. In the second stanza the original has a he Rose and a she Sun; but the he throughout the poem hardly expresses a gender. STANLEY. Translations and Poems of little mark. HALL of Durham : some Poems, "amatory and divine." DRYDEN: "glorious John!" The grandest of prose poets. His greatest poem is Absolom and Achitophel, a political satire against the Duke of Monmouth and Lord Shaftesbury (time of James the second). Among his numerous works are many plays, tragedies, and comedies, and adaptations of Shakespeare's Tempest and Anthony and Cleopatra. His latest important work was his Fables, Translations from Boccaccio, and from Chaucer-"into our language as it is now refined." He was the translator also of Virgil (the Æneid), Ovid, Juvenal, Theocritus, etc. St. Cecilia is said to have invented the organ; which should be known to explain the Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, and the last strophe of Alexander's Feast. FLECKNOE. Dates unknown; that of his death but guessed. A most industrious writer of verse and prose, fiercely satirized by Dryden. Of his productions we may mention Hierothalamium, or Heavenly Nuptials, 1626; the Affections of a Pious Soul, 1640; some Comedies; Heroic Portraits; and Epigrams. FLETCHER. Christened name unknown; nor of his works anything but a small volume of Translations from Martial, with a few original verses. SEDLEY: one of the wits and verse writers (perhaps the best) of the Court of Charles the second. RAMSAY: a Scottish bookseller and publisher, and literary impostor; notwithstanding a man of genius, chiefly of a comic vein. The Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral drama in Scottish dialect, 1725, is his own, and entitles him to fame. Of his minor poems it is difficult to prove the authorship. Two collections of Scottish and English Songs, the TeaTable Miscellany and the Evergreen, were brought out by him in 1724-7. The Miscellany contains many poems "by him"; the Evergreen purported to be by ingenious writers "before 1600," and has among undoubted old poems, one by Ramsay, signed A. R. Scot, the Vision, stated by him to have been "compylit in Latin anno 1300." The Yellow-Hair'd Laddie then may or may not be his. Brae-broken ground, as on a hill-side; winna bught in—will not come into the bughts-the pens in which they are milked; butt the house-outside; kirn-churn; crack-talk. POPE. In 1709 Pope published his Pastorals; the Essay on Criticism in 1711; the Rape of the Lock, his most poetic poem, the "most exquisite filagree-work ever invented," "the daintiest of all mock heroics," in 1714; translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey between 1715 and 1726; the first part of the Essay on Man in 1732; and his Dunciad in 1728, enlarged in 1742-3. The scope of the present volume forbidding fragments, not even the perfection of smoothly measured versification for which he is most to be considered can have fair representing. The Ode on Solitude, by his own account, was written by him before he was twelve years old. THOMSON. The Seasons (Winter, Summer, Spring, and Autumn, in such succession), 1726-30; Liberty, 1734-5; the Castle of Indolence, in Spenserian stanzas, his best work, 1748. His dramas are of little worth. GRAY. A man of leisure and inactivity; his inspiration cramped. Notwithstanding his few poems show him as an accomplished writer. The Elegy is his masterpiece. In a manuscript draft, immediately after the line With incense kindled at the Muse's flame, he concluded the poem with the following four stanzas: The thoughtless world to majesty may bow, Exalt the brave, and idolize success; But more to innocence their safety owe Than power or genius e'er conspired to bless. And thou who, mindful of the unhonour'd dead, Hark! how the sacred calm that breathes around No more, with reason and thyself at strife, Again, after completing his new version (these stanzas omitted), he struck out the stanza in parenthesis, before the Epitaph; altering also the firstwritten names of Gracchus, Tully, and Cæsar, to Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell, as they now stand-the Cromwell certainly not according so closely with the utterance of the line. The occasion of the Bard is the massacre of the Welsh Bards by Edward the first. Berkley's roofs-Berkley Castle, where Edward the second was murdered, his wife consenting; the mighty victor is Edward the third; the sable warrior-the Black Prince, who died before his father; Thirst and Famine refer to Richard the second, starved to death; the bristled boar is Richard the third; and the form divine is Elizabeth, of Welsh descent. COLLINS: a poet of genius; but his life aimless and closing in insanity. His works Oriental Eclogues and Odes descriptive and allegorical. AKENSIDE a physician. His best-known poem, the Pleasures of Imagination, was published in 1744. His miscellanies were collected in 1772. Bourbon's might, Braganza's treasure-the power of France and Indian wealth of Portugal. JEAN ELLIOT daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, of Minto House, Teviotdale, where she was born. The Flowers o' the Forest (the Forest being the name of a large Border district, on the Scottish side) is also called the Lament for Flodden, for the defeat of James the fourth at Flodden Lilting-carolling; yowe-milking—ewe-milking; ilka—each; loaning— a lane; wede-weeded; scorning-rallying, chaffing; dowie-dreary; da fin'-joking; gabbin'-chatting; luglen-milking-pail; shearing-reaping; bandsters-sheaf-binders; lyart and runkled—grizzled and wrinkled ; fleeching-coaxing; gloaming-twilight; swankies-lithe, active lads; bogle-ghost; dule-grief. COWPER: author of John Gilpin. His most important poem is The Task, in six books. Of other sustained works the chief are his TableTalk and Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools. He wrote also Olney Hymns; and translated the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. The lines on the loss of the Royal George tell their own story. It happened in Portsmouth harbour, in 1782. Mary was his most faithfully attached friend, Mrs. Unwin, the cheerer of long years clouded by religious melancholy. BRUCE, of Scottish birth, in youth a shepherd, died of consumption while studying for the Secession Church. His trusted friend and literary executor, the Rev. John Logan, published the lines To the Cuckoo as his own, omitting one stanza (the seventh) which identifies it with Bruce. Dr. Grosart, in his edition of Bruce's few poems, 1865, conclusively proves both Logan's theft and Bruce's authorship. SIR WILLIAM JONES is scarcely to be counted as a poet even for these high-toned lines. Trench gives The fiend Dissension: which seems to make sense; but in the copy printed by the "Society for Constitutional Information," about 1780-2, the Ode apparently written for them, it is The fiend Discretion. CHATTERTON: the" marvellous boy," who astonished and puzzled the literary world with his Poems of Rowley: forgeries, purporting to have been written in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Rev. Walter W. Skeat has completely overthrown the supposition of there being any early English foundation for these poems. He shows the metres to be wrong, the words wrongly syllabled, the phrases involving anachronisms. Nothing but patience is required to unravel every riddle which the Rowley poems present." Their sole claim to attention is as the remarkable work of a precociously clever boy. The Roundelay (from Ella, "a Tragycal Enterlude or Discoorseynge Tragedie wrotenn by Thomas Rowleye") and a Ballad of Charity (of his latest writing) give fair indication " of what he might have done had he lived. Barely eighteen when, despairing of life, he poisoned himself. As he "coined a language," so he made his own glossary for words not otherwise to be explained. Cryne is hair; rode-complexion ; dentefasten; gre-grow; Ouphante-Elfin. BLAKE engraver, painter, poet; who wrote, printed, and published his poems, with his own designs, his own engraving, and his own colouring. Very beautiful some of these, young and simply natural, giving promise, as with Chatterton, of a rich maturity; but excess of imagination, verging on insanity, rendered his longer and later works incoherent and unintelligible. His shorter lyrics, his best, yet not always clear, are in the Songs of Innocence, 1787, and Songs of Experience, 1794. Jerusalem and Milton, "written against his will," soon after 1800, was the latest of his longer poetic utterances. After that he devoted himself mainly to Art. BURNS. Hallow-een, the Cotter's Saturday Night, "and other poems," appeared in 1786; Tam O'Shanter in 1793. No need to comment on Songs which have gained a world-wide popularity, which close our four centuries of Verse with a music ever fresh and young as that of Chaucer in his youngest days. Very many of Burns' songs, altered or built up from old fragments, were contributed by him to Johnson's Scots' Musical Museum; and others afterward to Thomson's collection of Original Scottish Airs. Wad-would; bide the stoure-bear the storm; yestreen-yester-even ; braw-smart; sleekit-creeping; brattle-stir; pattle-a stick to clear the plough of earth; daimen icker—an odd ear of corn; thrave-a number of sheaves; the lave-the remainder; big-build; foggage-moss; snellbitter; but house or hauld-out of house or hold; thole-endure; cranreuch-frost; no thy lane-not alone; agley-awry; stoure-here meaning the ploughed-up ground; bield-shelter; histie-barren ; ilka—every ; airts-quarters; row-roll; shaw-a copse, a wood; knowes-knolls, hills; aboon-above; scaith-injure; tent-guard; steer-molest; staw-stole; fou-full of drink, merry; coost-toss'd; asklent-askance; unco sleighvery proudly; gart-made; abeigh-by; fleech'd-coax'd; grat, etc.— wept till his eyes were blear'd and blind; louping-leaping; linn-waterfall; smoor'd-smother'd; crouse and canty-brisk and jolly; snool-snub; bluntie-stupid; gleib-patch, morsel; clout-snatch; kith-friends, not relations; spier-ask; coof-fool, a word of contempt; loof-the open hand, the inside; warily tent-be on the look out; back-yett-back-gate; |