Later on, one of the Fitzroys was created Earl of Southampton, and acquired this manor in fee-simple. The eldest son of the Duke of Grafton, the Earl of Euston, has his name recorded in Euston Road and Euston Square, though the Southampton branch of the Fitzroy family are the present owners of the estate. A small but important estate in the Strand, including Norfolk Street, Surrey Street, Howard Street, and other thoroughfares between the Stand and the Embankment, belongs to the Duke of Norfolk. The Howard family is one of the oldest landowners in Middlesex, being preceded by the Russells and Cecils only. The value of this estate since the formation of the Thames Embankment must have been greatly increased. The site adjoining the Outer Temple-the former residence of the Earl of Essex-was occupied by the Bishops of Bath, whose rights were usurped by that Seymour who was brother to the Protector Somerset. At his death, Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, bought it for forty-one pounds six shillings and eightpence, and in 1579 it devolved upon the Howard family. The Savoy estate belongs to her Majesty, having been settled with other property of the Duchy of Lancaster on the sovereign for the time being by the son of John of Gaunt, the first Duke of Lancaster. Cecil Street, Salisbury Street, and neighboring property still belong to Lord Salisbury. A few words in conclusion as to the large landowners in outlying districts of London, such as Lord Amherst. The Tyssens were formerly merchants in Holland, who settled at Hackney near London in the reign of James II., and purchased the manor in the year 1600. The property passed in the latter part of the last century by marriage to the Amhursts of Rochester, and subsequently to the Kentish family of Daniel, who thereupon assumed the surname and arms of Tyssen. The additional name of Amhurst was then taken. The present head of the Tyssen Amhurst family was recently created a peer under the style of Baron Amherst of Hackney. De-Beauvoir Town to the north of Hoxton is part of this estate, and records the marriage of a certain Francis Tyssen of Shacklewell to a daughter of Richard de Beauvoir of Guernsey. Another landowner, possessing states in Bermondsey, Southwark, Camberwell, and Newington, has been recently ennobled as Lord Llangattock, better known as Mr. Rolls of the Hendré. The Rolls property includes the thoroughfare (recently celebrated in noble verse!) known as the Old Kent Road. The property of the Pratt family is situated in the St. Pancras district. Charles Pratt, Earl Camden, became possessed of the estate which now is called Camden Town by his marriage with the daughter of Nicholas Jeffreys about the middle of the last century. St. Pancras seems to have been one of the many prebendal manors around London, and was held by a Canon of St. Paul's. A separate manor appears to have passed into the hands of the Cantlo or Cantilupe family, and under its present corrupted name of Kentish Town is practically owned by the Pratts, though it is said to be subject to a nominal rent to the prebendary. Another hamlet of St. Pancras, known as Somers Town, is named after the family of its present proprietor, Earl Somers. It will be seen that the corporation of the City of London, the Livery Companies, and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners have been omitted from the foregoing account of London's great landowners. Lightning and Trees.-Investigations made by Dr. Carl Müller, and reported in Himmel und Erde, show that lightning prefers to strike certain kinds of trees. Under the direction of the LippeDetmold Department of Forestry, statistics were gathered showing that in eleven years lightning struck fifty-six oaks, three or four pines, twenty firs, but not a single beech tree, although seven-tenths of the trees were beech. It would seem, then, that one is safer in a storm under a beech tree than under any other kind. For SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made A KENTISH SCENE. Here Hopebourne lies, and, to my mind, B. H. H. Thinks I to myself, I have hit on a strain, Sure marriage is just like a Devonshire lane. In the first place, 'tis long, and when once you are in it, It holds you as fast as a cage does a linnet; For howe'er rough and dirty the road may be found, Drive forward you must, there is no turning round. But though 'tis so long, it is not very wide, For two are the most that together may ride; And e'en then 'tis a chance but they get in a pother, And jostle and cross, and run foul of each other. Oft Poverty greets them with mendicant looks, And Care pushes by them, o'erladen with crooks; And Strife's grazing wheels try between them to pass, And Stubbornness blocks up the way on her ass. Then the banks are so high, to the left hand and right, That they shut out the beauties around them from sight; And hence you'll allow 'tis an inference plain, That marriage is just like a Devonshire lane. But thinks I, too, these banks, within which we are pent With bud, blossom, and berry, are richly besprent; And the conjugal fence, which forbids us to roam, Looks lovely, when deck'd with the comforts of home. In the rock's gloomy crevice the bright holly grows, The ivy waves fresh o'er the withering rose; And the evergreen love of a virtuous wife, Soothes the roughness of care-cheers the winter of life. Then long be the journey, and narrow the way, I'll rejoice that I've seldom a turnpike to pay; And whate'er others say, be the last to complain, Though marriage be just like a Devonshire lane. REV. JOHN MARRIOTT. From The Quarterly Review. THE POETRY OF THE DE VERES.1 The Wordsworthian tradition has fared ill in poetry since 1850. That tradition lays emphasis upon the attitude and habit of mind involved in poetic composition, and thus upon its substance; to language, however skilfully handled it denies any sufficient virtue to elevate or of itself make poetic the ordinary material of thought. With Wordsworth it was the impassioned and truthful view of things that was essential; when that was lacking, the "accomplishment of verse" was a trivial copy-book matter. Poetry for him was "the breath and finer spirit of knowledge, the impassioned expression that was on the face of science," and against all theories of "poetic diction," against any effort to construct poetry out of words in the absence of the inspiring idea he had set his face from the first. The root-conception in the Wordsworthian, as in the classical theory of poetry, is that the employment of rhythm, and more especially of the complex rhythms of lyric verse, presupposes some depth of meaning, some intensity of emotion which prose at its best can but imperfectly and inadequately render. It is certain that verse attracts because verse is an intense and emphatic form of expression. It is equally certain that verse 11. Julian the Apostate and The Duke of Mercia. By the late Sir Aubrey de Vere. London, 1858. 2. Mary Tudor. An Historical Drama. In Two Parts. New Edition. By the late Sir Aubrey de Vere. London, 1884. 3. Sonnets. By Sir Aubrey de Vere, Bart. A New Edition. London, 1875. 4. The Poetical Works of Aubrey de Vere. Three Vols. London, 1892. disappoints and wearies, save in the way of parody or comedy, when there is nothing intense or emphatic to express; when an attempt is made to transmute the trite, the fanciful, or the commonplace, to disguise them in the robes of sovereign thought-the truly intense and emphatic — by tricking them out in metrical dress. If it were possible to constitute a Supreme Court of Appeal in matters poetic before which aspirants for the poet's bays were by law compelled to appear, such a court might fairly demand in the first instance from each candidate some work in prose, not as an exercise in language, but as a witness to intellectual or imaginative power, as witness to a way of regarding things, to mental methods at once rational and suggestive, to types of thought or feeling for the perfect representation of which verse was the natural and proper medium. Did such a court exist, we should be spared the frequent necessity of the judgment best delivered in Heine's words, "Das hättest du Alles sehr gut in guter Prosa sagen können." But the decrees of such a court would condemn a vast number of our poets to the exile of perpetual silence. Wordsworth denied then "that poetry can boast any celestial ichor that distinguish her vital juices from those of prose." But in the "superlative lollipops" of his early verse Tennyson once more asserted the inexhaustible charm of cunning modulation and verbal melody, even when but slightly informed by any real force of thought or feeling. The course of the later stream of poetry has flowed in other channels than those in which Wordsworth would have had it run. The sover 5. Legends of the Saxon Saints. By Aubrey eignty of the spirit is no longer recogde Vere. London, 1893. 6. Mediæval Records and Sonnets. By Aubrey de Vere. London, 1893. 7. Legends and Records of the Church and the Empire. By Aubrey de Vere. London, 1887. 8. The Legends of St. Patrick. By Aubrey de Vere, LL.D. London, 1892. nized, and, with exceptions few and honorable, the poets have sworn allegiance to Our Lady of Music. The poetry approximating to music, expressive of half-articulate emotion not yet definitely yoked with or transmuted 9. May Carols; or, "Ancilla Domini." By Au- into mental images,-this poetry, debrey de Vere. London, 1881. 10. Odes and Epodes of Horace. Translated by Sir Stephen de Vere, with Preface and Notes. London, 1893. pendent for such value as it may possess upon its expression rather than upon its spirit, is the characteristic poetry of the latter half of the present | recent poem to its source by an investi century. In Mr. Swinburne, its leader, and the popular choir, the view of things taken by the poet, his philosophy, his imaginative grasp and interpretation of life count for little. In their place delicate turns of phrase are zealously sought out, the dainty effects of collocated vowels, the ripple of alliteration, the aromas and the colors sense. We are that fascinate the presented by the poets of to-day with phials full of odors, and he is the best poet whose distillations catch the breath and sting the nerves with the most pungent perfumes. Yet, however far we are tempted to wander from it, the severe magnificence of pure as distinct from decorative art never fails to recall us, and we know that to it the final success indisputably belongs. Read but diligently enough in Mr. Swinburne's many volumes, and after a time the charm begins to fail, it ceases to have its early effects; we are taking in nothing, we are simply marking time musically. In the verse of the majority of our poets it is the same. Nothing is to be found there that is not very pleaswe in the end ing, but are not pleased. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. There is nothing "to hold or to keep," and we recognize that beyond the marking of time musically we have been unemployed. A critic who abides by the Wordsworthian tradition essays to distinguish between poets by the internal differences in their work due to divergent mental methods and symthe pathies, by intellectual and emotional framework upon which the artist builds. Such a critic seeks for the soul of the work, which is the fountain of its power; his endeavor must be to find the individual character, the man in the poem. He will recognize a poem as Shelley's or as Byron's by the unmistakable internal evidences of its authorship, by the spirit that is abroad in it. In the poetry of our own time what guidance from internal evidence is possible? The critic will trace a gation of the vocabulary, the structure of the rhythm, and it may be by echoes of the poetry other than his own read by the author. They are past as a slumber that passes, As the dew of a dawn of old time; More swift than the shadows on glasses, More fleet than a wave or a rhyme. We know this style; not by its heart of thought, but by its parti-colored raiment. The voice is the voice of Mr. Swinburne, but the commonplace is the commonplace of the general choir. Now we maintain that in the case of the "Dî majores" the commonplace is their own commonplace, it is part of the general stock that they have appropriated and assimilated; the spirit that is abroad in them shines throughout their speech. These thoughts may startle well, but not astound The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended By a strong siding champion, Conscience. The voice is undoubtedly the voice of Six feet in earth my Emma lay, The voice of Wordsworth not at his best, but Wordsworth's intellectual method is displayed here. The great mass of modern poetry offers on the contrary nothing to give the clue to any unique individual pattern of mind possessed by the poet. It confines itself to saying nothing in particular with delicate perfection, in an exquisite key of words. The office of the modern poet seems to be that of carpet-minstrelsy; the heroic lyre is tuneless now, the manly voice is seldom heard. An enduring truth, a true instinct lies at the root of Wordsworth's theory that greatness in art is greatness in conception, that “fundamental brainwork" is the secret of its power. |