When the school hour draws near, she wraps him in his warm scarlet mantle, puts on his velvet cap, and placing him, with a kiss, in his little coach, he is drawn to school by Robin, the gardener. Happy mother! happy child!

Cowper's mother died when he was about six years old, and the troubles of his life commenced, for shortly after her death he was sent to a boarding school, where his sensitive spirit was crushed. The grief of the child was as profound as the sorrow of the man.

"My mother! when I learn'd that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?
Hover'd thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life's journey just begun?
Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss ;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss.
Ah, that maternal smile! it answers-Yes.
I heard the bell toll'd on thy burial day,
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away,
And turning from my nursery window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu!"

"I can truly say," he wrote nearly fifty years afterwards, "that not a week passes (perhaps I might with equal veracity say not a day) in which I do not think of her; such was the impression her tenderness made upon me, though the opportunity she had for showing it was so short."

When Cowper was twenty-four years old, and an idle lawyer in the Temple, his father died, and the rectory of Berkhamstead ceased to be his home. "At that time I was young," he writes, over thirty ⚫ years later, too young to have reflected

much. It had never occurred to me that a parson has no fee simple in the house and glebe he occupies. There was neither tree, nor gate, nor stile in all that county to which I did not feel a relation, and the house itself I preferred to a palace. I was sent for from London to attend him in his last illness, and he died just before I arrived. Then, and not till then, I felt for the first time that I and my native place were disunited forever; I sighed a long adieu to fields and woods, from which I once thought I never should be parted, and was at no time so sensible of their beauties, as just when I left them behind me, to return no more."

Oliver Goldsmith was descended from a family in which the office of clergyman was hereditary. His father, the Reverend Charles Goldsmith, was a minister out of employment when he married Anne Jones, the daughter of another minister, the mas

The

ter of the diocesan school at Elphin. The marriage was not approved by the friends of either, and an uncle of Mrs. Goldsmith, who was the rector of Kilkenny West, was soon called upon to assist the imprudent couple. He lent them a house about six miles from the Rectory, where they resided for about twelve years, and where several children were born, Oliver among others. After the death of this providential uncle Mr. Goldsmith succeeded to his benefice. His fortunes do not appear to have bettered by the change in his prospects, for though his income may have been larger, there were more to consume it. Other children were born, and those who were growing up were to be educated. little means that could be got together were spent on the education of the oldest son, Henry, while that of Oliver was neglected. It was the intention of his father to bring him up to trade, but his mother fancied she saw genius in him, and she persuaded her good man to give him a learned education. He was sent to Trinity College, Dublin, at the expense of an uncle and other friends, who contributed to his support, and who must have been disappointed at the figure he cut. "The Goldsmiths were always a strange family," we are told, "they rarely acted like other people: their hearts were always in the right place, but their heads seemed to be doing anything but what they ought." Goldsmith ought to have applied himself to his studies, but, being Goldsmith, did not. While he was at college his father died, and if he was not deeply mourned, he was very tenderly remembered by his idle, improvident, warm-hearted son, who has painted for us three exquisite portraits, of which he was the originalone in the Man in Black, in "The Citizen of the World," another in immortal Dr. Primrose, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and the last in the Village Preacher, in "The Deserted Village."

One would hardly think that Goldsmith was desirous of being thought a man of good family, but such was the case, for he claimed affinity on his father's side with General Wolfe, and on his mother's side with Oliver Cromwell! One would never think that Shakespeare was guilty of the same weakness, but it looks very much like it, for the grant of arms which his father sought in vain, was applied for and obtained, about thirty years later, and in a very questionable way. One would

think, however, that Pope would have tried to make himself out somebody on the score of his ancestry, and one is not disappointed to find that he did so. It was in keeping with his mind, which was as crooked as his body.

Pope's claim to gentility was put forward in his forty-sixth year, when he was the most famous living English poet, and it would seem at first for the purpose of puzzling Curll. Pope did not appear in the matter, but one mysterious "P. T." who informed Curll by letter that Pope's father was of the younger branch of a family of good repute in Ireland, and related to the Lords Downe, formerly of the same name. If "P. T." was not Pope, he was some one in communication with Pope, who was always ready to furnish misinformation in regard to himself. His claim to reflected gentility in the persons of the Lords Downe, was repeated two or three years later, in a Note prefixed to his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," in which his father is stated to be of a gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the Earl of Lindsay. This "fine pedigree," as it was called by one of called by one of Pope's kinsmen, who repudiated it, was an absolute fiction. There was an Earl of Lindsay, as there were Earls of Downe, but Pope was no more descended from the latter than he was from Pope Joan.

The Christian name of Pope's father, as well as his family, eluded all his early biographers, but it is now known to have been Alexander. When his son was born, he was a linen draper in Lombard Street, London. "He was an honest merchant," Mrs. Pope informed Spence, "and dealt in Hollands wholesale." Hollands were evidently in demand in the last years of the seventeenth century, for our dealer therein was prosperous enough to retire from business with what was then a large fortune-ten thousand pounds. Precisely when this occurred, we are not informed, but it is supposed to have been in the sixth or seventh year of the poet's age.

The elder Pope, with his elderly wife and young son, removed to Binfield, in Windsor Forest, where he had purchased twenty acres of land, and a small house. He was a Roman Catholic, and so rigid a one that Alexander was afraid to write verses and send profane letters in Holy Week under his eye. To be a Roman

Catholic then was not to be in favor with the powers that were, which is probably the reason why the retired merchant was said to have indulged in the unmercantile freak of locking up his money in a strong box, and living on the principal. The story is Warburton's, and unworthy of belief. We know now, what Warburton might have known, that, in addition to his house and grounds at Binfield, Pope's father possessed property in Surrey, and a yearly rent-charge upon a manor in Yorkshire, besides eight or nine thousand livres in French securities. In a word, he was rich.

The mother of Pope, whose name was Edith, was a daughter of William Turner, Esq., of Worsborough Dale, Yorkshire. We have the authority of Pope that she had three brothers, two of whom perished in the Civil Wars, while the third became a general officer in Spain. If Mrs. Pope, who was about forty-six when she gave birth to Alexander, had not been the tenderest and most careful of mothers, her son would not have lived long. He inherited from her a sickly constitution, which was perpetually subject to severe headaches, and from his father, his poor, crooked little body; physically it was "a heritage of wo." He charmed the household by his gentleness, and his voice was so sweet that he was called "the little nightingale." He was considered a prodigy from his infancy, and was one: I know of none greater, unless it be Chatterton. If the "Ode to Solitude" was written, as he claimed, when he was about twelve, he surpassed at that age every English poet. He could not remember when he began to write verses: he lisped in numbers. His father encouraged him, though he was no poet, as his widow quaintly remarked to Spence. "He used to set him to make English verses when very young. He was pretty difficult in being pleased, and used often to send him back to new turn them. 'These are not good rhimes;' for that was my husband's word for verses."

The picture of this precocious young poet and his parents in the little house at Binfield is a delightful one-more delightful, it seems to me, than any that can be painted of his after life. He was as studious there as the young Milton had been at Horton, and was as free from anxiety about his future. He was happy among his books, he was happy in his father's gar

den, and he was happy in the shade of his favorite beech tree-the tree under which, tradition says, he sat when he composed his poem in praise of Windsor Forest. He was happier for the moment, I think, when some one took him to Will's Coffee-house to see Dryden. "I saw Dryden when I was about twelve years of age.

I remem

ber his face well, for I looked upon him even then with veneration, and observed him very particularly." I must not write about Pope, however, and the great men he saw, and the noble friends he made, and the clever poems that he wrote, but confine myself to his parents, who continued to reside at Binfield until his twentyeighth year, when they removed to Chiswick, exchanging the leafy avenues of Windsor Forest for a row of pollard elms and a sight of the Thames. They had lived to hear a full song from their little nightingale, and were growing old; one at least was infirm. Pope's father died at Chiswick at the age of seventy-five.

"By nature honest, by experience wise,

Healthy by temperance and by exercise;
His life, though long, to sickness passed unknown.
His death was instant and without a groan."

Pope announced his death in a note to Martha Blount: "My poor father dyed last night. Believe, since I don't forget you at this moment, I never shall."

About two years after the death of his father, Pope removed to his villa at Twickenham, taking his mother with him. Genetrix est mihi, he wrote to Atterbury, when he condoled with him on his loss. He was as unceasing in his solicitude for her as she had been for him in his tender

years.

"Me, let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age,
With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death:
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep awhile one parent from the sky!"

Mrs. Pope survived her husband sixteen years. Her memory was gone, but she was conscious of the affectionate attentions of her son, which doubled the necessity of his attendance on her, he said, and at the same time sweetened it. She died at the great age of ninety-three. "I thank God her death was as easy as her life was innocent," he wrote to Richardson, the painter; "and, as it cost her not a groan, nor even a sigh, there is yet upon her

countenance such an expression of tranquillity, nay, even of pleasure, that it is even amiable to behold it. It would afford the finest image of a saint inspired that ever painting drew, and it would be the greatest obligation which even that obliging art could ever bestow upon a friend, if you would come and sketch it for me." Richardson hastened to him, and made the sketch as he wished; but it was not a What had been Mrs. Pope pleasing one. was buried in Twickenham Church. There was nothing to suggest gentility in the funeral, which was as simple as possible. The body was carried to the grave by six poor men of the village, clad in suits of dark gray cloth, the gift of the poet, and was followed by six poor women, in the same sort of mourning. There was in his grounds at Twickenham a retired spot encircled with a plantation of evergreens, yews, and cedars. Here he erected a large obelisk in memory of his mother, and inscribed upon the pedestal this touching epita h

AH EDITHA! MATRVM OPTIMA! MULIERVM AMANTISSIMA!

VALE!

Shortly after Pope removed from Binfield to Chiswick, there came into the world, at the house of a scrivener in Cornhill, a poet whose constitution was as delicate as his own, and whose genius was of a higher order. He was the son of Mr. Philip Gray, the aforesaid scrivener, and his wife Dorothy, whose maiden name was Antrobus. He was the fifth of twelve children, and the only one who survived, the rest perishing in infancy from suffocation produced by a fullness of blood, a fate which threatened him, but which was averted by the courage of his mother, who removed a paroxysm which attacked him by opening a vein with her own hand. She was a brave as well as a loving mother, and she needed all the bravery that she possessed, for her husband, who is described as a respectable citizen, was brute. When she married him she was in partnership with her sister Mary and her brother Robert, and carried on the trade of a milliner. A woman of business, she had positive ideas as to the rights of woman, and she took the precaution of tying up her property before she married Mr. Gray. It was agreed between them, and between them and her partners, that her

a

share in the trade should be employed by her sister Mary in the said trade, and that the same and all profits thereby should be for her, Dorothy's, sole benefit. It was further agreed that, if either she or her husband died, the property should go to the survivor.

This agreement, which was as stringent as the law could make it, was probably not drawn by Mr. Gray, who was scoundrel enough to have made it a defective paper. He was perpetually trying to break it, and to break her heart, for from the beginning of their marriage he treated her inhumanly, not merely showering upon her vile and abusive language, but actually beating her and kicking her, until she was at last obliged to quit his bed, and lie with her sister. This brutality continued, not a month or a year, but upwards of thirty years, and all the time she was bearing her poor, doomed children! But, great as was the brutality of her husband, it was exceeded, if that was possible, by his meanness. For during all these years she was not only no charge to him, but she found herself in all manner of apparel, and all her children also, and most of the furniture of his house, besides paying forty pounds a year for his shop, and providing for her son, for whom he would do nothing, when he was at Eton and Cambridge. There was a pretense of love, too, in this usage, for he appeared to be jealous of all men as far as she was concerned, even of her own brother! What he loved was her

money, and it was in order to obtain it that he abused her so. Nor did he stop there. He gave her sister warning to quit the shop where they carried on their business, which would have almost ruined it, and would have compelled his wife to go with and assist her sister for the support of herself and her son. He threatened to pursue her with vengeance, and to ruin himself to undo her and the boy.

She was unconquerable, this brave old milliner, who, at the age of sixty-four, submitted her case to a practitioner at Doctors' Commons. The opinion he gave was not comforting. She was told that if she went to live with her sister, to assist her in her trade, he might, and probably would, call her, by process in the Ecclesiastical Court, to return home and cohabit with him, which the Court would compel her to do, unless she could show reason to the contrary. She had no other defense in that case than to make proof before the

Court of such cruelties as might induce the judge to think she could not live in safety with her husband, when the Court would decree for a separation. She was advised to bear what she reasonably could, and to give him no provocation to use her ill. If he forced her out of doors, the most reputable place she could be in would be with her sister. If he proceeded to extremities, and went to law, she would be justified if she stood upon her defense, rather perhaps than as plaintiff in the cause. Lastly, as no power of making a will was reserved by her marriage settlement, her original stock in trade, and likewise the produce and interest which should accrue, was settled upon her husband, if he survived her.

I have confined myself, as my readers have no doubt perceived, to the dry legal statement of the sufferings of Gray's mother, not wishing to blacken the memory of his father with any words of my own. They were simply terrible. They were inflicted, it is sad to think, not in Turkey, but in England; not the England of Henry the Eighth, but the England of Queen Anne and George the First; the England of Pope, Addison, and Steele, of Will Honeycomb, and Sir Roger de Coverley! Was the age of chivalry past, or did it exist only on paper? All things come to an end, however, even the lives of scriveners, one of whom, Mr. Philip Gray, went to his last account at the age of sixty-five.

What Gray owed to his mother may be imagined. It was she who saved his life when he was a child; and it was she who sent him to Eton, where he remained six years, and to Cambridge, where he remained three or four years, and to the continent, where he traveled with Horace Walpole, living the life of a thoughtful and elegant scholar. She lived to see twelveis it harsh to say-happy years after the death of her husband, to see her love repaid by the genius of her son. As devoted to her as she was to him, he never mentioned her without a sigh. And when she died, full of years, he placed over her loved remains this most pathetic inscription:

Beside her Friend and Sister,
Here sleep the Remains of
DOROTHY GRAY,

Widow; the careful, tender mother
Of many Children, one of whom alone
Had the Misfortune to survive her.
She died March XI., MDCCLIII.
Aged LXXII.

Gray had written his immortal Elegy, and the greatest of his Odes, which were coldly received, and was adding to his immense stock of knowledge by reading and transcribing manuscripts in the British Museum, which had just been opened to the public, when, on a January day, in a little town in Scotland, a greater poet than himself, the song-writer of all time, was born. His parents were poor. They were born poor, they lived poor, they died poor. His father, William Burness, the son of a farmer, and one of a family of seven children, went out into the world in early manhood, with empty pockets, seeking his fortune, which never came. He went to Edinburgh, where he managed to save up a little money, which was dutifully sent to his parents. Then he became a gardener in Ayrshire, and finally took a lease of seven acres of land at Alloway, near the bridge of Doon, and upon this land built with his own hand a clay cottage. To this cottage he brought his newly married wife, who was ten or twelve years younger than himself. She was the daughter of a farmer in Carrick, and her maiden name was Agnes Brown. Her mother died when she was nine years old, and the care of four younger children was thrown upon her. There were servants on the farm, but their services were so valuable that they could not be spared for nursery work. She had been taught to read the Bible, and to recite the Psalms, by a weaver, who kept young scholars beside his loom as he worked, but now her schooling came to an end. She could not write to the day of her death the mother of Robert Burns was never able to write her name. When her much-marrying father married again, she went to live with her dead mother's mother, who, when she was particularly pleased with her doings at the wheel, used to give her for lunch a piece of white bread, and a piece of brown bread, both being made of varieties of one kind of oat-meal. William Burness met her at a fair, courted her vigorously for a twelvemonth, and married her, a lass of twentyfive.

Her figure was small and neat, her complexion fine, her hair a pale red, and her eyes dark and beautiful. She had a cheerful disposition, and a budget of old songs and ballads which she sang to her children, and sang well, too.

William Burness was a poor man, and the children which came to him increased, while they brightened, his poverty. He

determined that they should have an education, and sent Robert to school in his sixth year. A few years later he undertook to teach him and his brother Gilbert himself. He was a wise man, in his simple way; he treated his boys as if they were men, and lightened their labors on the farm by entertaining and instructive conversation. Burns was alive to the necessity of learning, and to the thoughtful anxiety of his father, who in turn was alive to his genius. "Whoever may live to see it," he said to his wife, "something extraordinary will come from that boy." The pa

They were a happy family. rents loved each other, and the children; and the children loved each other, and their parents. William Burness was a grave man; not averse to innocent gayety, but naturally of a religious tone of mind. Christianity was the rule of his household. He was the sire with patriarchal grace whom Burns has painted so lovingly in "The Cotter's Saturday Night," and the three tunes that the Cotter's family sang were the only tunes that he knew. The years went on, and the elder children grew up. They removed to Mount Oliphant, and phant, and to Locklea, but prosperity avoided them. The tall thin figure of the old man was bowed, and his scanty locks were gray. He went about his work wearily, but cheerfully. One day he came home from sowing, worn out with fatigue. He had used all the threshed-up grain, and more was needed for the horses' dinner. He must see to it. His wife insisted that he should rest, and taking her maid-servant with her went to the barn, where the two soon had the corn for the horses threshed and winnowed. He took to his bed one winter day, and rose no more. His daughter Isabella remembered being present at his bedside the morning he died, with her brother Robert, and that she wept bitterly. Her father endeavored to speak, but could only murmur a few words, such as were suitable for a child, enjoining her to walk in virtue's paths, and to shun every vice. He paused a moment, and said there was one member of the family whose future conduct he feared. He repeated the remark, and Robert came to the bedside, and said Oh, father is it me you mean?" The dying man said it was. He turned to the window, the tears streamed down his manly cheeks, and his bosom swelled as if it would burst. When the pious soul of William Burness

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