Sighs," and it is not likely to diminish. Hood's life was a pathetic one in that he was never well and was compelled to write comic poems for a living when he was weak and suffering. His courage, his kindliness, and his patience were never exhausted or even diminished by pain and sickness, for he had the cheerful heart of the unselfish man. He died at the age of forty-seven. Winthrop Praed, though distinctly a minor poet, deserves mention for his preeminence in one form of verse. The subject matter of "vers de société" is the actions and motives of men and women as members of "good society." Its tone is urbane, good-tempered, gay, and trifling; its form must be dainty and finished. It may be slightly cynical but not satiric, pathetic but by no means tragic. It must express the indefinable air of culture and good breeding, and it must accomplish its end with apparent ease and indifference. Praed does this and does it so naturally and so pleasingly that he is, if not the first, certainly among the first of the writers of "society verse." He, too, was born in London, the son of an eminent barrister, and made the regular progress from Eton to Trinity College, Cambridge. In both places his career was brilliant. At Eton he was the chief contributor to the Etonian, which he made the best undergraduate magazine ever published. At Cambridge he took an exceptional number of literature prizes and was distinguished as a speaker. He was called to the bar in 1829, returned to Parliament in 1830, and would undoubtedly have been distinguished in the public service had his health not failed. He died of consumption at the age of thirty-seven. His verse, contributed largely to Knight's Magazine, makes only a thin little volume, but it is the best of its kind ever written in English. The "Vicar," the "Belle of the Ball," "Private Theatricals," "A Letter of Advice," and "School and School-fellows" are especially marked by pleasantry and wit. 1775-1817. Sir Walter Scott gave the historical novel a vividness and picturesqueness which it has rarely attained since, Jane Austen, although it is asserted that modern research has presented the outside of the life if not the spirit of early times more accurately than could be done by his romantic enthusiasm. At the same time an English girl set the model for the quiet novel of contemporary society. Jane Austen was the daughter of a Hampshire rector. Well read and well educated for a girl of the period, and gifted with great powers of observation and description, and excellent sense, she photographed the manners of the Hampshire gentry and their womankind with great delicacy in her first novel, "Pride and Prejudice." This was written in 1796. It was followed by Sense and Sensibility"; and "Northanger Abbey," a half-parody of the pseudo-romances of the day like the "Mysteries of Udolpho," was finished soon after. None of these found a publisher till 1811, the publishers' readers being blind to the peculiar merits of the books, or seeing that they were not of a kind to appeal to the general public. 66 All good judges are agreed that Jane Austen's books, though deficient in incident and dealing with a restricted set of motives and confined to portraying a narrow and provincial society, are unequaled in character drawing and touched with delicate feminine humor. The dialogue is natural and characteristic, and the author is no unworthy predecessor of Trollope and Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Gaskell. 66 Her other novels are "Mansfield Park," Emma," and "Persuasion." All are of the same class. "Pride and Prejudice" is the best, and a certain tendency to repeat the types of characters appears in the last two. But all are fine, delicate work. Walter 1771-1832. The great Scotch novelist and poet was born in Edinburgh, the son of a "writer to the signet" (attorney). His health in childhood was not very strong, and although he possessed a powerful physique, and was capable of an immense amount of work in his maturity, he remained all his life perceptibly lame from the effect of a slight arrest in the growth of his right leg during his boyhood. From an early period of his life he took a great interest in folk poetry and in the innumerable traditions of the Scotch Border, and chance threw him in the way of many who were willing to indulge his delight in stories and ballads. While still a schoolboy, he learned Old French and read collections of early romances, and thus prepared himself for his vocation as story-teller, unconsciously, but with great thoroughness. He was admitted to the bar in 1792, and in 1799 obtained the office of deputy sheriff of Selkirk. As he had collected Border ballads and many details of Border history, and had published in 1802 a collection of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" and a translation of Goethe's drama of feudal history, "Götz von Berlichingen," it was natural that he should try to embalm in verse some of the incidents of the Border forays that appealed so strongly to his imagination. A friend repeated to him. portions of Coleridge's "Christabel," and in the varied and lively form of the four-accent measure he found the meter that suited him. The legend of Gilpin His Poems. Horner, the mischievous hobgoblin, was suggested to him as a subject, and about this as a center he grouped the incidents of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel." The simplicity and energy of this poem, as good as any of his subsequent ones, led to its immediate popularity. It was published in 1805, and was followed in a year by “Marmion," and in 1810 by the "Lady of the Lake," the most generally liked of any of his narrative poems, and later by "Rokeby" and the "Lord of the Isles." Scott wrote also a number of excellent and spirited Scotch songs, some of which were molded out of current folk songs and were set to popular tunes. The Soon after the publication of the "Lay" he had begun and subsequently laid aside a prose romance, "Waverley." When the fame of Byron began to make Scott's poems look rather pale, he resuscitated and completed the story. It was published in 1814, and its immense success showed him where his true strength lay. In the next two years, besides doing a large amount of outside work, among other things he edited Swift's works and wrote a life of the author, he produced "Guy Mannering," the "Antiquary," the "Black Dwarf," and "Old Mortality." At the same time he kept up at Abbotsford, the fine place he had built, a lavish hospitality. The secret of the authorship of these novels was preserved, partly to mystify the public and partly, perhaps, for whim. Scott's intimate friends, of course, knew the truth, but it was hard to make acquaintances believe that the genial host could produce one or two novels a year in addition to the literary work he acknowledged. Even when suffering from ill health he continued to "do the work of four men." "Rob Roy," the "Heart of Midlothian," the "Bride of Lammer |