Evenings with the Poets.

SIXTH EVENING.

As time passed on with the happy Christmas party at Derley Manor, they seemed to enter every day with increasing spirit into the various plans for the occupation of their time, and above all into that scheme of poetic recreation which engaged the pleasant hours of candlelight, when they all gathered round the large old fashioned library hearth, and, with curtains close drawn, and brightly flazing fire, competed together in the illustration of the beauties of the poets. Each successive leader of the evening's literary recreations, seemed to vie with his or her predecessors, in aiming at the suggestion of some new theme of novelty or peculiar attraction. The choice of a sovereign for this evening fell on Thomas Merton, a lively youth, fresh from Eton, and entering with all the exuberance of youthful gaiety into the out-door sports of the fore

noon, and the less boisterous amusements of the evening. Though he had been foremost in the shout and laughter of the merry troop of skaters, or the snowball parties during the day, he looked somewhat abashed on finding himself the object of all eyes in the library, and would probably have very willingly exchanged his new throne with the quietest on-looker in some dark corner of the room. There was no choice,

however, and so, mustering courage for his novel duties, he craved the attention of his auditors, in the following words, to a few gleanings from

The Satiric Poets.

I am afraid I may be thought to retrace the steps of my predecessor, who so pleasantly engaged your attention on a former evening, with illustrations of Poetic Humour. Though some, however, of the Satiric Poets of England are the same as those who rank among the poetic humourists, their satiric compositions deserve a separate notice, as altogether distinct and important creations of the poet's pen. The pen of the satirist, though too frequently dipped in gall, has often been usefully employed as a moral agent for correcting and reforming errors that might have