enjoyed her success. It was by his persuasion she had entered upon the translation of the Homilarium, on which she was still engaged, and with such indifferent prosperity, that she must have needed all the old Teutonic scholar's | enthusiastic love of her task to support her hopes of ultimate success. countenance and few subscribers in Oxford, though she prints the Saxon Homilies there. I can't but wonder at it, not doubting but the colleges would all subscribe for their libraries. I shall be glad to know the reason so few subscribe at Oxford. I believe, notwithstanding, that she will not want subscribers, she printing At this period of quickly-recurring sorrow but a few. Good Dr. Hicks has often declared and settled difficulty we see and hear no- to me it was as well done as could be desired or thing of the Prebend of Canterbury, Rector of expected-as well done as he, had he underTollington, Uncle Charles. We can ima- taken it, could have done it, so that I can't gine him recovered from the surprise of but wonder so few subscribe with you." Her finding his niece famous on the publi- want of patronage at Oxford resulted from cation of the Homily, and subsiding into some- the rancour of party feeling. Elizabeth had, thing akin to self-gratulation that, after all, his as we before pointed out, damaged herself opinion was correct, and that her present with the Oxford Jacobites, by the dedication tronbles would have been lighter had she ac. to Queen Anne of the Homily in 1709, and quired domestic accomplishments instead of of the A. S. Grammar to the Princess of Wales, the "drug called learning," as Rowe Mores sub-1715. After all, her case was but another sequently phrased it. illustration that one is never a prophet in one's own country; but, notwithstanding her failure in the fair city of her early promise, the publication of a few more of the homilies, or of other literary work, appears to have enabled her to free herself from her pecuniary difficulties, as the following passage in a letter from the Rev. Thos. Baker to Mr. H. Wanley inform us : It is to be hoped that he did not stand aloof from the sorely-tried and solitary woman toiling painfully over her costly and ill-requited task, which, out of the circle of ripe scholars, versed themselves in the old Northern tongues, could hope for little intelligent appreciation. How often in the course of the exquisite transcripts traced in her "fair, pretty hand"-many of which, thanks to the first two lord Harleys, are preserved for us in the Harleian MSS.-must she have paused to push back, as it were, into the shadow of the grave the memory of him of whom she might have said-to paraphrase the language of Andromache "Father to me thou wert, and mother too, And sister, too, dear brother of my heart!" How she must have missed the scholarly suggestions, the sweet praise, the fond encouragement, the council, and the converse! How she must have pined for him throughout the weary days to talk with and to tend, as she had done in the years that were gone, and how this emotional hunger and thirst, this famishment of the affections must have eaten into her heart, and for a time, at least, have made the wilderness seem better to her than the world, is evident from her after-conduct. It is noticeable that, on the breaking up of her home and the loss of her two nearest friends, Elizabeth does not return to Oxford or Canterbury, where the greater number of those who had known her in her youth resided. She seems to have made up her mind to succeed, if possible, with her learned labours, and to have recognized London (then, as now, the headquarters of all aspirants) as the best place for carrying out her plans. In this course, in all probability, her late friend Dr. Hicks, the Wanleys, William Bishop of Gray's Inn, and Bowyer the printer encouraged her. Just two years after her brother's death we find Mr. Bishop writing to Dr. Charlett, Feb. 26th, 1717: " Being this day with Mrs. Elstob, I find by her that she has great encouragement and many subscribers at Cambridge, and little "WORTHY SIR,—I am glad to hear that Mrs. Elstob is in a condition to pay her debts. For me she may be very easy, though I could wish, for the sake of the University (though I am no way engaged, having taken up my obligation), that you could find the book, or at least could find where it is lodged, that Mr. Brook may know where to demand it. This, I presume, may be done." The rest of this letter refers to matters quite apart from Mrs. Elstob; but a note, in Wanley's hand, adds: "Mrs. Elstob has only paid a few small scores.' When we remember that five only of the Homilies were published, and that the translator was almost without other resources than her pen supplied; that then, for want of subscriptions to pay the cost of printing it, the great workt the preparation for which had occupied many years or parts of years, and to which she had given so much patient labour, careful thought, and exquisite manipulation, fell through. We do not wonder so much that with such slender means she did not pay her debts however, they had arisen, as we do at the unfeeling way in which this clergyman and scholar, in the early days of her self-dependence and desolation bandied her short-comings to and fro. There appears to have been no attempt on the part of those who had been the friends and associates of herself and brother to assist her efforts or relieve her from the pecuniary difficulties which expensive studies, the small income, and long illness of her brother, had involved her in. These debts may have been contracted for personal expenses while superintending the progress of the "pompous folio", *Original letter in Harl. MS., 3728, art. 43. through the press, or for printing it. It is not | Indeed, she not only avers, as we have seen, unlikely, too, that calculating with Broome upon that a knowledge of the primitive tongue is its ultimate success, notwithstanding the necessary to the student who desires to be discouragement of the Oxford scholars, she acquainted with the foundation and character might have been improvident, and deserving in of the English language, but those days of the reproach of Rowe More, who acquaintance is needed with the Scandinavian, tells us that" she pursued too much that drug Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, or Old Norse, and called learning, and in that pursuit failed of Frisian; for these form the web and woof, being careful for any one thing necessary"-a so to speak, of English, upon which we have paragraph that says much for her earnest brochéd the elegant phrases of the southern scholarship, and little for her thrift. It is tongues. With these northern dialects she more than likely that she "ate her corn in the herself was intimate, and dwells with evident blade," and that she was not yet accustomed love of them on their verbal wealth, flexibility, to that miserable state, which obliges a and power. conscientious expender to count his coin before venturing to furnish himself with even necessary wants. The Hanoverian succession had "settled," as was said, the Protestant religion in England. There was no longer any occasion to rummage manuscripts older than Alfred's time to show that the Romanism of the present was not the catholicism of the Anglo-Saxon Church, or that it had always asserted and maintained its independence of the Church of Rome. No need for going back to Egbert of Iona, to prove that the gospels had been translated into the vernacular as early as the Eighth Century, and that neither transubstantiation or the celibacy of priests had made part of its doctrines. This had been the origin of the sudden interest in the writings of the Anglo-Saxon fathers; but with this use of them came the recognition of their value, in a philological sense, in reference to the study of and improvement of the English language; a subject that, from the time of the Restoration, had engaged the attention of many learned men. Soon after the Restoration the Earl of Roscommon (Wentworth Dillon), assisted by his friend the poet Dryden, had attempted to form a society for the "Refining and fixing the standard of the English Tongue." Evelyn addressed a letter on the subject to the Royal Society, in which he observes that "Chaucer, Leland, and especially some of our antienter Saxon writers, have some words and expressions of greater comprehension, and not to be contemned, were we not exceedingly given sometimes to change for the worse." So had thought the learned Dr. Hicks, and so thought his learned protegée, Elizabeth Elstob. Here and there in her translations of the Homilies, we come on passages almost poetical in simple pathos and tenderness of expression. In the sermon on the birthday, for so our Saxon forefathers called the death-day of the Innocents, she says, "they were snatched from their mothers' breasts, but they were placed in the bosoms of angels. They were called martyr blossoms, because they were like springing blossoms in the midst of cold unbelief;" but she nowhere bids us look for literary treasures in the Anglo-Saxon language, though she strenuously asserts its importance in the study of and improvement of English. 66 Her judgment and appreciation are now fully endorsed by those of the profoundest philological scholars, and we see the very language and arguments which she used them in their writings and discussions without more than a century-and-a-half since, used by reference or acknowledgement to "the first Lady-Saxonist's" essay on the subject, for such we may consider her preface to the AngloSaxon Grammar. In the political and religious excitement that followed the succession of James, the work of the Society for the Improvement and Culture of the English Tongue," fell through; but the necessity for a general standard of the language became more and more apparent to men of letters and scholars generally. Swift, as we have said, published a letter on the subject to the Lord Treasurer in 1712, in which, according to his biographer, he exhibited, a want of knowledge of the leading facts in the history of his undertaking. But, notwithstanding this ignorance on the part of the leader of the projected society, no doubt service was done by ventilating the subject, and much more would have resulted had the intention been carried out; but, in the bitterness of party-feeling, Swift was supposed to have had no higher purpose in this patriotic scheme, than to "create an office of power and profit." Mrs. Elstob's suggestions touching the use of the northern tongues whenever such a design should be undertaken, did not appear till three years afterwards. "It was not," says John Petheram, "till religious reformers discovered in the writings preserved in the primitive tongue a powerful weapon for their controversies with Rome, that any attention was bestowed on the cultivation of the AngloSaxon language." But the researches commenced by Bishop Parker, successor to Reginald Pole, and renewed for the purpose, as we have seen by the Septentriontalists of Queen's College during the religious commissions in the time of the Stuarts, have been continued to our own; thanks to Dr. Rawlinson, the founder of the Anglo-Saxon professorship at Oxford, the chair of which at present, is so ably filled by the distinguished northern scholar, Dr. Bosworth, who bears witness to the true service done to AngloSaxon literature by the Elstobs and their learned associates, and especially refers to Elizabeth in the preface to his "Thesaurus." same Deference for Dr. Hicks had probably kept in check the practical exhibition of the Oxford men's disgust at Elizabeth Elstob's open defection to the Whigs; but now that her brother and the Dean of Worcester were both dead, and she stood alone, unsupported by their reputation or position, except from the little knot of Anglo-Saxon scholars with whom her kindred studies had associated her, hope of encouragement at Oxford was out of question. They did not so much as furnish their college libraries with a copy; and as general subscriptions to the work must have been very limited, the great encouragement at Cambridge was not sufficient to counterbalance the want of it elsewhere, or enable the author to continue the publication of the work. a With the failure of the "Homilarium" failed the literary hope of her life. No longer praised, and eulogized as the "Saxon Nymph," on a sudden stripped of "gentle fortune," and the position she had held amongst the most learned men of the day. Poor, and solitary, and thirty-four years of age, she appears for a time to have accepted the niggard generosity of former friends, and the genuine hospitality of the Bishop of Bristol (Dr. Smallridge), who was as remarkable for his polished manners and amiable disposition as for what was then called Like Dr. Hicks, he was polite learning. staunch high-churchman and a great controversalist, but he appears not to have allowed his opinions to have overruled his pity for and esteem of Mrs. Elstoh. He, of all the crowd who had applauded her extraordinary acquirements and industry, and fed her with professions of friendship, and compliments, and praise, appears to have felt real sympathy for her, and to have exhibited any appreciable degree of practical kindness. It was Bishop Smallridge who answered indignantly, when Sacheveral tried to flatter him by affecting to believe him the author of the "Tale of a Tub." "Not all that you or I have in the world should hire me to write The Tale of a Tub.'" the bishop was by no means rich in this world's goods; a fact that Mrs. Elstob was perhaps conscious of, and which possibly hastened the resolution she seems to have arrived at, when, after a time, her spirit, which had been crushed by her bereavement and unaccustomed distresses, rose from their heavy pressure, humbled, yet strong; and she appears to have determined to remain no longer a burden on the generosity of one who was himself, says Nichols, far from opulent.* And * While the first draught of this chapter was being written, the direct link between the present and the persons written about, was lost by the death of Mr. John Bowyer Nichols, son of John Nichols, author of the "Anecdotes," the apprentice of Bowyer, whom he succeeded in 1778, and who knew the Elstob's. Mr. J. B. N. was 85 at the period of his death, sometime in the week ending, October 24th, 1863.-ED. THE FATAL SPELL. BY L. P. SHORTHOUSE. A waking dream a youth entranced; And love would in his bosom swell: But Mammon saw, and rang his knell, And hopeless life would seem to be; Ah! broken was that spell to be, That sunlight hid by frowning clouds; The severing blade its work should do. "A time to die," the funeral knell Rings sadly-" Love's lost !" "Love, Adieu!" Shrewsbury. LOVE'S DESPAIR. BY THE LATE WILLIAM LEIGHTON. Full of the fever of a hopeless love, My heart's wild worship still is all thine own; Unchanged, unchangeable, tho' doomed to move O'er life's dim waste alone. Ah! all too deep for words of mortal breath; "Tis death to see thee in thy joyousness, To meet thine eye, the smile upon thy lips, And feel this world a blighted wilderness, And life a vast eclipse. So sad and weary! I would ask no more Than on thy breast to breathe my latest sigh, Like some worn wave, that seeks a peaceful shore, On which to break and die ! *An inscription on a seal. THE WIVES OF THE POETS. BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. "By the grace of God we are here assembled," On examining the biographies of literary men, the reader cannot but be struck by the obscure part which the wife plays in the drama of such lives. Her history, as a general thing, is unwritten. The encyclopedias record the date of her marriage, and sometimes condescend to say when she died. Much more than this we are seldom permitted to know. Her leigelord neglected to write her epitaph, however glad or sorry he may have been to have the opportunity of doing so. That the wives of poets should have so often escaped the celebrity which keeps their husbands forever young, cannot always be pleasantly explained. In many cases they have been inferior women, unable, through a lack of intellectual sympathy, to reach that enchanted sphere wherein moves most that is holiest and enduring of the literary man. If they have loved, it has been with the heart wholly, and with the brain not at all. Poets, it is said, require a two-fold love one for themselves and one for their art. When the fool in the play asks the lover how tall his mistress is, the lover neatly replies, “Her height, prithee? As high as my heart!" When an author's wife is also as high as his brain, "it is then truly that the intercourse of the sexes becomes the most refined pleasure;" and, ten to one, she laughs and weeps and is delicious forever in a novel, or dwells, with all her graces, in the rhythm of a lyric that perpetually sweetens the lips of the world. She so far fails in answering the requirements of her station who is shut by incapacity from her husband's demesne of thought. Such unions are fireside tragedies-the more tragic, inasmuch as the actors are souls rather than bodies, the more hopeless because the agony of the play is purely intellectual. For one reason or another the wives of the poets, as a class, are a sadly neglected group of ladies; in proof of which I am cruelly bent on making a poet bear testimony. My witness is Mr. R. H. Stoddard, who some time since appeared as the editor of a volume of that peculiar kind of poetry in which he himself excels as an author. The fact is (and it is rather a pathetic fact, if you wish it so) literary men have been very chary in their praises of married life-especially the poets, who are popularly supposed to be the legal guardians of the blind little boy with the bow and arrows. In looking over Mr. Stoddard's "Loves and Heroines of the Poets"-the most faultless collection of love-poetry in the language-an illnatured person might smile at the meagre number of poems which the poets have addressed to their own wives. Even these few poems, with eight or ten exceptions, lack the flavour and felicity which characterize their authors on other less audible occasions. They are not the real sparkling champagne, but very "still gooseberry." If the editor had restricted his selections to readable "Stanzas Addressed to my Wife," he might have put all his material in a pocket-book. He would have found few such noble verses as Bishop King's "Exequy." For those poets who have made themselves famous by singing of Chloe and Amaryllis, whom they did not marry, are generally as mute as moulting robins concerning Maria and Clementina, whom they did marry. From this point of view the lady-love appears to have been everything, and the wife-nothing! "Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life ?" Now, for my part, I am cynical enough to believe that he would have written much better sonnets, and maybe an epic or two, by way of variety. It requires something more terrible than a noble woman to spoil the verses of a decent poet. One of the chief pleasures in contemplating the lives of the old English singers, is to know that some of those master-spirits were blessed, in their rough pilgrimage, by gracious wives, whom they loved, though they neither dedicated folios nor always wrote flowery poems to theu. Perhaps they held domestic love too sacred to sing about it. At all events they sang but seldom, and then not always excellently well. In Mr. Stoddard's volume I find one hundred and twenty-six poets. Of these one hundred and twenty-six sixty are married men; of these sixty about thirty have sung the praises of their wives; and of these thirty only about fifteen have sung anything worth the singing. There may be some slight error in these figures, for I am distinguished for my horror of mathematics; D but the statement is sufficiently correct for the | We are acquainted with Mr. Waller's Amoret occasion. The limits assigned to a magazine article will not allow me to discuss in detail the ladies of these sixty poets. But what a curious history they would make! How their stories would involve kings, courtiers, beggars, fools, and knaves! What royal women some of them were! What spendthrifts, what sweet-tongued creatures, what scolds! How some of them ruined their lords, with no other charm than the crimson thread of their lips! It is odd that Disraeli, in his "Calamities of Authors," neglects, as I believe he does, to mention woman. The shrews of literature, with a minute account of "the life, sufferings, and death" of hen-pecked authors, would make a long and comical chapter. But a longer, though not so comical a chapter, might be furnished by the pale ghosts of neglected wives. As I lean over my friend's book, what phantoms from the dark night without, from old, mossy English kirk-yards, hover about me in the dim gaslight of my chamber, each whispering some strange tale of cruelty and neglect, telling of unvalued loveliness and patience and devotion ! "Of love that never found his earthly close, Ah! you poor little women, some of you have been shamefully not taken care of. Dante wove such a wreath of laurels for Beatrice, that the beauty of the Florentine woman, with her blood-red dress, has stood the test of five hundred years. The wife of the gloomy Tuscan is the merest shadew beside her immoral rival. Howard Earl of Surrey wraps the Lady Elizabeth Gerald in a pretty name, and pens sentimental sonnets to her eyebrows-just as if his own wife had no eyebrows, and very charming ones! But he seems to have no music left for his cousin Lady Frances Vere, to whom he was betrothed in his boyhood. The elaborate Sir Philip Sidney wasted his anapests and dactyles on a pair of restless court fireflies, to the neglect of a lovely woman, the pink of whose little finger-nail was worth a whole race of such female fops. And Shakespeare, too, Shakespeare has a sweet mysterious lady embalmed in his sonnets, like a fly in amber. There is not a beautiful flower, according to the bard, which does not steal its shape, its colour, or its perfume from her perfection. The stars are lighted by her eyes. She causes day and night by her coming and going. In her praises he makes mellifluous words fall into line and sweep on with triumphant music. But what of Mrs. Shakspeare-the gentle Anne Hathaway? He leaves no immortal verse to her-only an old bedstead in his last will and testament! Milton has three wives, and writes one sonnet on Mrs. Milton No. 2-after he buries her! "Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me, like Alcestis from the grave." and Saccharissa who gave him a cold shoulder, as he deserved, for he was an insincere piece. We all know his reply to Saccharissa when, in after-life, she, in her rouge and powder, asked him, "Mr. Waller, when will you write such fine verses to me again?" 'O, madam !" replied that gallant old boy, "when your ladyship is as young again." 66 We know these things, and a great many more not so much to the credit of this sparkling, velvet butterfly; but we have not had the pleasure of meeting either of his two wives in the society of the muses. I fancy he did not trouble himself much about them; but he made the brides of other people famous. This hasty and by no means complete list of celebrated "loves" and unknown wives, is growing too long; but I must add to it one wife and one love more pitiful than all-Stella and Vanessa, the two ill-starred ladies rendered historical personages by Swift's verse and Swift's cruelty. My author has told their story very pathetically in his note on Swift. These two women lavished on the savage Dean such pure idolatry as the world has seldom witnessed. By what wizard spell he possessed nimself of these unfortunate hearts, it is difficult to surmise. For years he held their souls in his hand, tossing them to-and-fro as a conjuror tosses the gilded balls. To Stella he was married, though the marriage was not publicly acknowledged, and the parties never met except in the presence of a third person. Vanessa, after cherishing for eight years the hope that Swift would make her his wife, could no longer bear the suspense which was undermining her health; she wrote to her rival, praying she would tell her whether or not she was Swift's wife. Stella immediately answered in the affirmative. After suffering such mortification and misery as would have driven any man but Swift to suicide, Vanessa died in resentment and despair. Four years after this, Stella lay on her death-bed. For fourteen she had waited in vain for love to dawn in the bosom of this poor wretch. It is said that a brief conversation then took place between them relative to their unproclaimed marriage. Only Swift's reply was overheard. "it shall be "Well, my dear," he said, acknowledged, if you wish it." "It is now too late," said Stella, with a sigh. It was too late. She died of lingering decline in January, 1728. "After Stella's death," says Mr. Stoddard, "and probably after Swift's, one of her raven tresses came into the possession of an antiquary. It was wrapped in paper and labelled, in Swift's handwriting, Only a woman's hair.” As I read this bitter page of secret history, spectral hands seem to turn over the leaves for me, and spectral fingers to rest sarcastically on the glittering tropes and flowery nothings with which Swift garlanded his victims. I shall have to turn up my gaslight and read "The |