committee clerkship in Washington. Meantime, however, I am just resuming work for the editors"—after nearly a year in search of health at Tampa, Fla., and in Georgia. He also now utilized his studies of English literature in a course of lectures on Elizabethan verse, which was delivered to a parlor class of thirty ladies. The enthusiastic reception accorded them induced him the following winter (1878-79) to give a Shakespeare course, concerning which he wrote to Mr. Peacock November 5, 1878: "I wished to show, to such a class as I could assemble, how much more genuine profit there would be in studying at first hand, under the guidance of an enthusiastic interpreter, the writers and conditions of a particular epoch (for instance), than in reading any amount of commentary or in hearing any number of miscellaneous lectures on subjects which range from Palestine to pottery in the

course of a week."

Financially,

both courses were a failure, but besides the great praise which they called forth there came at last, and almost too late, the long-desired appointment to a position in the university. It took the shape of a lectureship on English literature-the duties of which he was to assume the following scholastic year-and President Gilman's official notification reached the poet on his birthday, February 3, 1879, bringing with it the assurance, for the first time since his marriage twelve years before, of a fixed income. The summer of 1879 was spent at Rockbridge Alum Springs, in Virginia; and such was the rapidity with which he was now working that in six weeks he put into permanent form the results of his studies and investigations of the subject of versification. Used first as lectures, the work appeared in 1880 as "The Science of English Verse," and con

tained the theories which at times seemed to be dearer to the author than the success of his own poetry. Like other original treatises, it has called forth curiously opposite statements, ranging all the way from Mr. Stedman's, "That remarkable piece of analysis, The Science of English Verse,' serves little purpose except, like Coleridge's metaphysics, to give us further respect for its author's intellectual powers," to Prof. Sill's "The work of Sidney Lanier on English verse may be recommended as the only one that has ever made any approach to a rational view of the subject.

Nor

are the standard ones overlooked in making this assertion." A modification of the latter view seems more likely to prevail, as not a few are inclined to accept it as the best working theory for English verse from Cædmon to Tennyson that has yet been produced. This is specially true of those who stand

66 on that middle ground where Lanier dwelt, halfway between verse and music." Fortunately, however, Lanier was able to throw off the shackles of his Science, as Poe was of his Rationale, though not so uniformly nor so completely as Poe. It would have been better, however, if Lanier had ever kept in mind some of the closing words of this treatise, "that the matters herein treated are only in the nature of hints, . . . and by no means laws. For the artist in verse there is no law: the perception and love of beauty constitute the whole outfit; and what is herein set forth is to be taken merely as enlarging that perception and exalting that love. In all cases the appeal is to the ear; but the ear should, for that purpose, be educated up to the highest possible plane of culture."

With great rapidity and evenness of work Lanier edited also between 1878 and 1881 a series of books for

boys, which appeared as follows: "Froissart," 1879; "King Arthur," 1880; "Mabinogion," 1881; and "Percy," 1882. The editing shows not only knowledge, taste, and conscientious labor; but also reveals that genuine love for the old, the chivalrous, and the romantic which springs from a natural affinity. He dearly loved old English worthies, chroniclers, and poets, while knights and knightly deeds captivated his imagination and influenced his conduct. The "Introductions," written in admirably pure English, are fine specimens of a didactic narrative style, and, like everything the author wrote, almost every sentence discloses some feature of his mind or character. It will doubtless interest many to read again his last words to American boys, written at "Camp Robin," near Asheville, N. C., a few weeks before his depart"He who waiks in the way these following ballads point will

ure: