early in the century. Then his pen lay idle for five or six years. In Gertrude of Wyoming he resumed his wooing of the muse, and afterwards wrote the exquisite O'Connor's Child; or, The Flower of Love lies Bleeding!"

"Oh, once the harp of Innisfail

Was tuned full high to notes of gladness,
But yet it oftener told a tale

Of more prevailing sadness."

His Pleasures of Hope were written previous to Hohenlinden; The Battle of the Baltic, and Mariners of England, early before he took a rest. Moore's songs still hold their own, and are the sweetest ever written. His Lalla Rookh, so infused with the very soul of Eastern life and custom, is a marvel from having been written without the author ever visiting the spots he describes so truly. To Byron we are indirectly indebted for the Waverley Novels. His poetic genius was so superb and all-embracing as to throw his contemporaries into the shade, and with them Scott, who immediately yielded the place and turned to a field in which he has no master. However the poet's private life must be blamed, however much the egotism and irreligion of the man pervade his writings, Byron has put himself upon a pedestal before his countrymen from which there has been no hand, as yet, powerful enough to displace him. Shelley and Byron were friends and congenial spirits. Keats gave promise of much, but his early death prevented the fruition; his Ode to a Nightingale is very beautiful :

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My senses, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
The minute past, and Letheward had sunk :
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness-
That thou, a light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease."

The poem is too long to quote in full. The names of Shelley, Keats and Byron cannot be mentioned without bringing before us a fourth, their friend and companion,-Leigh Hunt. He had attracted attention before Shelley or Keats did. He is a true poet, and has put a living soul into whatever he has written. I wish I had space for the story of Sultan Mahmoud. It cannot be given in part. Nor can we here fail to remember another son of the Green Isle and of the Church, who hid his genius under the heavy cloak of a poor Christian Brother. Gerald Griffin wrote enough in prose and verse to entitle him to a high rank

among his peers. His Collegians is still read, and has been put into a form which will thrill Irish hearts all over the world as long as the theatre is tolerated. His poetry is sweet and touching. The Banim brothers also belong to this nineteenth century's literature.

With these names ends one phase of the nineteenth century's contributions to the literature of England. As to the rest we come too near our own day for much mention.

Let us take a retrospective view, then, of the forms and times which have passed before us. At the beginning comes the race, the people, Angles, Saxons, and Danish. Out of this mixture is to grow the nation, and by very slow processes it does grow. Christianity does its work, and ever in the wake of the Church come learning and letters, and men are awakened to the fact that they are not as the beasts which perish, that they have souls to save, and that God walked among them to show them how to save their souls. Then come the Normans, and difficult as the amalgamation of the two peoples is, it is not so desperate a task as it would be if they did not kneel at the same altars. Here again the Church was the salvation of the peoples. And so as the nation grew in stature it grew in grace with God and man, and the intellect bestowed upon Adam to mark his dominion over all creation was fostered and cultivated by the same power which guided souls along the dark and narrow way that leads to eternal light. Without the Church all would have been blankness and darkness. in souls and minds. Then comes one of those eras when the demon is unloosed and allowed to work his will upon mankind, and only for the remembrance of the former blessed light, and a dim reflection of its glory, the world would have again gone down into destruction at the hands of Luther and his compeers. Slowly ever since has the national literature of England been recovering from this blow, but it is only in proportion as the Church is recognized and free that it progresses. Thus we see the true history of literature is the history of man, for the soul of literature is but the soul of man.

What is properly a review or history of literature should close here, for history takes cognizance only of what is past; but we will not end this article without a short review of the Victorian era, an era as rich as any of its predecessors, and one which possesses perhaps more interest to us. The literary greatness of this age however, is manifested mostly in prose. Perhaps, too, in no other period has there been so much activity of female genius and talent, principally in fictitious narrative, yet ranging above and beyond that. At the head of this list, however we may reprobate the

work she did in Italy, we must place Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and she stands not only at the head of female writers, but of all writers in verse. We may even go further, and call her the greatest woman poet who ever lived, except Sappho, if she lived. There are no love poems in the language like her Sonnets from the Portuguese. I must find room for one:

"If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
I love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently; for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day;'
For these things, in themselves beloved, may

Be changed, or change for thee, and love so wrought
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry-
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore

Thou mayst love on through love's eternity."

Of her husband we cannot speak so enthusiastically. In fact we don't pretend to understand much that he has written, but we can never forget the rats in

"Hamelin town in Brunswick,

By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its walls on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied';
But when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so

From vermin, was a pity.

Rats!

They fought the dogs and killed the cats,

And bit the babies in the cradles,

And ate the cheeses out of the vats,

And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles."

As a specimen of another kind take the concluding lines of Paracelsus:

"I go to prove my soul!

I see my way as birds their trackless way-
I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first,

I ask not; but, unless God send his hail,
Or blinding fireballs, sleet, or stifling snow,
In some time-his own good time-I shall arrive;
He guides me and the bird. In his good time!"

Place now for the Laureate. How many who read Tennyson understand him? He has caught the spirit of the old legends wonderfully in The Idylls, and his Maud and Lockesley Hall are very beautiful, as well as some others of his poems. But of Tennyson in poetry, as of Thalberg in music, it may be said his art is more to him in its form than in its soul, and in refining the former the latter suffers. Still there are some wonderfully beautiful things, as, for instance, Arthur's farewell to Sir Bedevere :

"If thou shouldst never see my face again,

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought

By prayer than this world dreams of!

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."

And again in Lockesley Hall:

"Love took up the glass of time, and turned it in his glowing hands;
Every moment lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.”

We must not neglect Hood. The future will recognize him as a poet of the first-class. His Lost Heir is full of genuine Irish life. His Song of the Shirt is a truthful picture:

Stitch, stitch, stitch,

Band and gusset and seam,

Till over the buttons I fall asleep,

And sew them on in a dream!"

How many can sympathize with the

"One more unfortunate
Weary of breath;

Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!"

In novels the list of authors is unending; at the head stands Dickens, Thackeray, and “George Eliot," Bulwer, Miss Mulock, Black, and Blackmore; and how many others come crowding on! As a critic and historian combined Macaulay stands alone; Carlyle, too, occupies a pinnacle entirely to himself as philosopher and historian. Then we have Stuart Mills and his collaborateurs. Although our own literature, by reason of its language and nature, really belongs to that of England, we will not cross the seas. The laurels and bays that crown the heads of the writers of our own land have been placed there by a nation proud of her young children and their youthful promise. The time is not ripe for other than a loving glance over the by no means insignificant list, and each one can choose, as he or she, gazes, whomsoever the one so gazing thinks worthy of the wreath.

ENGLISH DEVOTION TO OUR BLESSED LADY
IN THE OLDEN TIME.

Pietas Mariana Britannica. A History of English Devotion to the Most Blessed Virgin Marye, Mother of God. With a Catalogue of Shrines, Sanctuaries, Offerings, Bequests, and other Memorials of the Piety of our Forefathers. By Edmund Waterton, F.S.A., Knight of the Order of Christ, of Rome. (Published by Subscription. Quarto. Pp. XVI., 266, 320.) London, St. Joseph's Catholic Library, 48 South Street, Grosvenor Square, W.

T is very natural that American visitors to England should be especially interested in the grand old cathedrals, and still more, perhaps, in the numerous ruined or half-ruined abbeys and monasteries with which the whole country is studded. These remains of an ancient faith, or, rather, of ages when the everlasting faith which now flourishes in the New World as well as in the Old, reigned in all its majesty and beauty over the whole face of England, have a peculiar charm for the faithful children of the Church whose home lies in the newly discovered continent which the Christian nations of Europe have had the mission of colonizing. Brightly as the light of the Catholic Church may burn in America, and glorious as may be the future which is reserved for her in the New World, she cannot, by the necessity of the case, possess any monuments such as those of which we speak. The Catholics of the United States and Canada will, as we trust, cover the land of their birth or of their adoption with glorious churches and religious houses, and no Englishman of their creed will wish them anything less than that they may even surpass their ancestors in the Old World in their devotion and piety. Providence has placed them in possession of a country such as never before fell to the lot of a young people to receive from His all-bountiful hands. Its natural resources are inexhaustible, and its political circumstances and position among the nations of the globe insure it a peaceful future, very unlike indeed to the early struggles of that Christian Europe, of which its people are the children. The development of Catholicity in the northern half of America is the most significant and consoling feature in the annals of the Church in the century in which we live. We can see no reason for doubting the future prosperity and magnificence of the Church in these countries,-and prosperous and magnificent it is,-and it will most certainly stamp the marks of its power and resources upon the face of the land in which it dwells, as the mediæval Church has stamped itself upon Europe. Everywhere we shall see fine churches dedicated to the worship of God, everywhere we shall see the minster rise in the