Page 40. It may possibly be urged by those who are not conversant with the history of the Sonnet that these two examples by Robert Herrick are not sonnets at all. Such objectors may well be referred to a short paper by no less an authority than Samuel Taylor Coleridge, entitled "What is a Sonnet?" which they will find in Blackwood's "Edinburgh Magazine," for June, 1832. The form used by Herrick is as legitimate as that in which Shakespeare's sonnets are written, and it is that adopted by Thomas Carew in his sonnet Love's Force, by Edmund Waller, by Cotton, and more especially by William Habington, the most productive sonneteer of Herrick's contemporaries, whose well-known collection of poems, Castara, is mainly composed of sonnets written in this form. The following may be quoted as a representative example of Habington's style :

Where sleeps the north-wind when the south inspires
Life in the spring, and gathers into quires

The scattered nightingales; whose subtle cars
Heard first the harmonious language of the spheres ;
Whence hath the stone magnetic force to allure
The enamoured iron; from a seed impure
Or natural did first the mandrake grow ;

What power i' th' ocean makes it ebb and flow;

What strange materials is the azure sky
Compacted of; of what its brightest eye
The ever-flaming sun; what people are

In the unknown world; what worlds in every star;
Let envious fancies at this secret rove;

Castara, what we know we'll practice, love.

Another sonnet, also addressed to Castara, begins:

By those chaste lamps which yield a silent light
To the cold urns of virgins; by that night

Which guilty of no crime, doth only hear

The vows of recluse nuns and the anthrït's prayer ;

and ends :

Thus my bright Muse in a new orb shall move,

And even teach religion how to love.

These lines are of themselves, perhaps, sufficient to prove that Habington was a poet, and one gifted with a fairly keen perception of the beautiful, yet it is to be regretted that he did not compose his sonnets in the Guittonian form, instead of following the example of Shakespeare and adopting a loose nondescript variation. The earliest fourteen-lined poem of this description that we remember to have met with is Lyly's Cupid and Campaspe, which is described in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient Poetry," as an exquisite sonnet." The latest

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example that we know of is Mr. Edward Carpenter's In Mortem F. D. Maurice, which will be found at page 144 of English Sonnets by Living Writers.

Page 45. So much has been written about the sonnets of Milton that it is unnecessary to here eulogize these "soul-animating strains," as Wordsworth wisely designates them. The nearest approach that has been made to their severe grandeur is to be found in the Rev. Thomas Russell's At Lemnos (page 69) and few sonnets have received such high praise as this has had bestowed upon it by no less illustrious critics than Cary, Landor, Wordsworth, Southey, &c. It should be observed, however, that Coleridge seems to have preferred the sonnet given at page 70. But "nemo solus sapit !"

Page 60. When Bowles first published his sonnets he was accused of having imitated those of Charlotte Smith. In what high estimation this lady's work was still held nearly thirty years after her death, may be gathered from the fact that the late Rev. Alexander Dyce included no fewer than nine of her sonnets in his Selection, whereas he only gives one by Keats, and entirely omits those of Shelley and Byron.

Page 62. The whole of this sonnet shows a master's touch. As might be expected, the best sonnets have been written by the greatest poets-by Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth,—and one is not surprised, therefore, to find that this by Burns is so good. The first four, and last two, lines are especially excellent.

Page 65. This-Echo and Silence-is one of the most famous of sonnets, and won no little praise for its author. Southey wrote respecting it, "I know not any poem, in any language, more beautifully imaginative." It is no doubt a highly finished and pleasing composition, and perhaps it were hypercritical to inquire why Echo is depicted as wearing a “robe of dark-green hue.”

Page 87. The sonnets of S. T. Coleridge are far from being his best work, yet two of them are unquestionably good, namely, Nature and Farewell to Love. Perhaps the very worst of all his sonnets-and he wrote, if we remember rightly, about five-and-twenty-is that To the Author of "The Robbers," of which Wordsworth very justly observed that it was too much of a rant" for his taste.

Page 94. To Innocence. Lamb was probably not fai wrong in thinking that this was the best of his "ewe

lambs," as he playfully called his sonnets. It is certainly far more pleasing than the one on Work, with its prosaic "dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood," and Satan's “pensive working-day 'mid rotatory burnings!" While it is less objectionable than his sonnet on Leisure, with its comic "white top of Methusalem,"-and the dull, unpoetic lines,

Which only works and business can redress-
Improbus Labor, which my spirits hath broke.

At the same time this, his favourite "ewe lamb," is not altogether without blemish, for Innocence does not become “awful "to ordinary men and women, even when it has, in a measure, departed from them; and most readers will probably agree in thinking that the finest and noblest of Lamb's sonnets,-and a very fine and noble sonnet it certainly is, is that entitled To a Friend.

Page 96. There is a sonnet by Lord Herbert of Cher bury, containing a somewhat similar idea to that of Blanco White's, of which the last lines, referring to Night, are as follows:

When thou dost reign,

The characters of fate shine in the skies,
And tell us what the heavens do ordain :