stretching down to the blue lake with the mountains beyond. Here he made his "Frater Ave atque Vale." Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row! So they row'd, and there we landed-O venusta Sirmio! There to me thro' all the groves of olive in the summer glow, There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow, Came that "Ave atque Vale" of the poet's hopeless woe, Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago, "Frater Ave atque Vale"-as we wander'd to and fro Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda lake below Sweet Catullus' all-but-island, olive - silvery Sirmio! Miss Ritchie was staying at Farringford when we came back from our foreign travels. To her he dwelt with more pleasure on the row to Desenzano than on almost anything else, and on the associations of Sirmione with Catullus. The long July twilight had at last died away whilst he talked of all he had been seeing, and lights were brought, and I fetched him a volume of Catullus. 1880 MISS RITCHIE He made Miss Ritchie, who was no Latin scholar, follow the words as he read through some of his favourite poems. His finger moved from word to word, and he dwelt with intense satisfaction on the adequacy of the expression and of the sounds, on the mastery of the proper handling of quantity, and on the perfection of the art. T. III 321 Y CHAPTER XII BALLADS AND POEMS. MY FATHER'S NOTES. "THE CUP.” 1880 THE Volume of the ballads and poems, dedicated by my father to his grandson "Golden-hair'd Ally," was published in my father's 71st year in 1880, and contains some of his most vigorous and dramatic poems. His manuscript notes on them are as follows: "The First Quarrel' was founded on an Isle of Wight story. Dr. Dabbs was the doctor. The poor woman quarrelled with her husband. He started the night of the quarrel for Jersey; the boat, in which he was, struck a reef and went down." 'Rizpah' is founded on an incident which I saw thus related in some penny magazine called Old Brighton, lent me by my friend and neighbour Mrs. Brotherton :1 1 "I told him the story one day at Farringford, knowing it would touch him, and he came up to see my husband and me next day, and 1880 PHOEBE HESSEL A conspicuous tombstone (at Brighton), to be read by every one passing through the churchyard, bears the following truly extraordinary inscription : PHOEBE HESSEL Who was born at Stepney, in the year 1713. December 12th, 1821, aged 108. "This epitaph gives the complete history of one of the most notable characters of Brighton, concerning whom it seems scarcely possible to say more than her tombstone records. For many years before her death, it should be mentioned that George IV. allowed her halfa-guinea a week. When the king saw her, and talked with her, he called her A jolly old fellow,' and offered her a guinea a week, which with a rare moderation she refused, saying, asked me to tell it him again on which I gave him the little penny magazine I found it in. It was an unpretentious account of Old Brighton.' Many months after he took me up to his library, after a walk, and read me what he called 'Bones.' That was before it was called Rizpah' and published." MARY BROTHERTON. 'Half that sum was enough to maintain her.' She is well remembered in Brighton still, as she used to sit in the sun against a house on the lower part of the Marine Parade. Her life was indeed an extraordinary one. After the death of her second husband, William Hessel, by the assistance of some friends, she purchased a donkey, and travelled with fish and other commodities to the villages about Brighton. "It was in one of these journeys that she obtained such information as led to the arrest and conviction of Rooke and Howell for robbing the mail, a circumstance which made a considerable sensation at the close of the last century. They were gibbeted on the spot where the robbery was committed, and there is an affecting story connected with the body of Rooke. When the elements had caused the clothes and flesh to decay, his aged mother, night after night, in all weathers, and the more tempestuous the weather the more frequent the visits, made a sacred pilgrimage to the lonely spot on the Downs, and it was noticed that on her return she always brought something away with her in her apron. Upon being watched it was discovered that the bones of the hanging man were the objects of her search, and as the wind and rain scattered them on the ground she conveyed them to her home. There she kept them, and, when the gibbet was stripped of its horrid burden, in the dead silence of the night she interred them |