will spend but six pounds on mine. I have left orders for the very commonest coffin that is made for the commonest man; and six of the stoutest and very poorest men to carry me to the grave, for which each shall receive one sovereign."

"But don't you pine for your beautiful Fiesole and its beautiful climate; don't you want your children; especially that daughter whose bust there opposite reminds one so of Queen Victoria ?”

“I could wish it, but it is better as it is. I can not live there. They can, and are happy. I have their society in their letters; they are well off, and therefore—I am contented."

With this he diverted the conversation to the decease of a mutual friend. "Ah! what a good, warm-hearted creature that was! There never was a woman so self-forgetting and full of affection. She lies in the church-yard just by here. We used to joke merrily on what is now halffulfilled. 'I shall be buried in · church-yard,' she once said. 'Why, I mean to be buried there myself. My dear Mrs. Price, we'll visit! Being such near neighbors, we'll have a chair, and make calls on one another!'" And at this idea he burst forth into one of those hearty, resounding laughs, that show in Landor how strangely fun and feeling can live side by side in the human mind.

Walter Savage Landor is one of those men who are sent into the world strong to teach. Strong in mind and body, strong in the clear sense of the right and the true, they walk unincumbered by prejudices, unshackled by force. They tread over the trim borders of artificial life, often oversetting its training glasses, and kicking over its tenderest nurslings. They break down the hedge of selfish monopoly, and carry along with them a stake from the gap, to have a blow at the first bull or bully they meet in the field. They stop to gaze at the idol of the day when they reach the city, and pronounce it but the scarecrow of last summer new

dressed. They enter churches, and are oftener disgusted with the dreadful religion made for God, than delighted with the preaching of that divine benevolence sent down by God for man. They weep at some recollected sorrow, but remembering that this is but a contagious weakness, they laugh, to make their neighbors awake from sad thoughts, and are pronounced unfeeling. They attack old and bloody prejudices, and are asked if they are wiser than any one else? They know it: the divine instinct, the teaching faculty within them, replies-"Yes." They go on strong and unmoved, though fewer perceive their great mission than feel them poking them in the delicate sides of their interests; fewer sympathize with their tenderest and purest feelings than are shocked by their ridicule of old and profitable humbugs. Misunderstood, misrepresented, and calumniated, they go on-nothing can alter them-for their burden and command are from above; yet every day the world is selecting some truth from the truths they have collected, admiring some flower in the bouquet of beauties they have gathered as they have gone through the wilderness, picking up some gem that they have let fall for the first comer after them, till eventually comparing, and placing all side by side, the world, with a sudden flash of recognition, perceives that all these truths, beauties, and precious things, belonged to the strange, rude man, who was actually wiser than any body else. Long may Savage Landor live to see the fruit of his undaunted mind gradually absorbed into the substance of society!

the perusal with the spirit of the region of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and with the more tragical tale of that Scottish queen, the gray and distant towers of one whose prison-houses could be descried from their resting-place, clad as with the solemn spirit of a sad antiquity. The book was The Story of Rimini. The author's name was to them little known; but they were not of a temperament that needed names—their souls were athirst for poetry, and there they found it. The reading of that day was an epoch in their lives. There was a life, a freshness, a buoyant charm of subject and of style, that carried them away from the somber heaths and wastes around them to the sunshine of Italy-to gay cavalcades and sad palaces. Hours went on, the sun declined, the book and the story closed, and up rose the three friends drunk with beauty, and with the sentiment of a great sorrow, and strode homeward with the proud and happy feeling that England was enriched with a new poet. Two of these three friends have for more than five-and-twenty years been in their graves; the third survives to write this article.

For thirty years and more from that time the author of Rimini has gone on adding to the wealth of English literature, and to the claims on his countrymen to gratitude and affection. The bold politician, when it required moral bravery to be honest; the charming essayist; the poet, seeming to grow with every new effort only more young in fancy and vigorous in style-he has enriched his country's fame, but his country has not enriched him. It is still time to think of it, and it might save many future regrets, if a government becoming daily more liberal, were to show that it knows the wishes of the public, and is glad to fulfill them.

We have the authority of Mr. Leigh Hunt himself, in a memoir written six-and-thirty years ago, for the fact that he was born in 1784, at Southgate. His parents were the Rev. J. Hunt, at that time tutor in the family of the Duke

of Chandos, and Mary, daughter of Stephen Shewell, merchant of Philadelphia, whose sister was the lady of Mr. President West. Thus the poet was by his mother's marriage nearly related to the great American painter; and here, he says, he could enlarge seriously and proudly; but this boasting, it turns out very characteristically, is not of any adventitious alliance with celebrated names, but of a truer and more happy cause of gratulation :—“If any one circumstance of my life could give me cause for boasting, it would be that of having had such a mother. She was, indeed, a mother in every exalted sense of the word—in piety, in sound teaching, in patient care, in spotless example. Married at an early age, and commencing from that time a life of sorrow, the world afflicted, but it could not change her: no rigid economy could hide the native generosity of her heart, no sophistical skulking injure her fine sense, or her contempt of worldly-mindedness, no unmerited sorrow convert her resignation into bitterness. But let me not hurt the noble simplicity of her character by a declamation, however involuntary. At the time when she died; the recollection of her sufferings and virtues tended to imbitter her loss; but knowing what she was, and believing where she is, I now feel her memory as a serene and inspiring influence, that comes over my social moments only to temper cheerfulness, and over my reflecting ones to animate me in the love of truth."

That is a fine filial eulogy; but still finer and more eloquent has been the practical one of the life and writings of the son. Whoever knows any thing of these, perceives how the qualities of the mother have lived on, not only in the grateful admiration of the poet, but in his character and works. This is another proud testimony added to the numerous ones revealed in the biographies of illustrious men, of the vital and all-prevailing influence of mothers. What does not the world owe to noble-minded women in this respect? and what do not women owe to the world and