a play. If he again attempt the drama, he has this
in his favour, that he will not deal in supernumeraries. In his tales
his minor characters are as carefully drawn as his chief personages.
Consider, for example, the minister, Henderland, the man who is so fond
of snuff, in "Kidnapped," and, in the "Master of Ballantrae," Sir William
Johnson, the English Governor. They are the work of a mind as attentive
to details, as ready to subordinate or obliterate details which are
unessential. Thus Mr. Stevenson's writings breathe equally of work in
the study and of inspiration from adventure in the open air, and thus he
wins every vote, and pleases every class of reader.

THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY

I cannot sing the old songs, nor indeed any others, but I can read them,
in the neglected works of Thomas Haynes Bayly. The name of Bayly may be
unfamiliar, but every one almost has heard his ditties chanted--every one
much over forty, at all events. "I'll hang my Harp on a Willow Tree,"
and "I'd be a Butterfly," and "Oh, no! we never mention Her," are dimly
dear to every friend of Mr. Richard Swiveller. If to be sung everywhere,
to hear your verses uttered in harmony with all pianos and quoted by the
world at large, be fame, Bayly had it. He was an unaffected poet. He
wrote words to airs, and he is almost absolutely forgotten. To read him
is to be carried back on the wings of music to the bowers of youth; and
to the bowers of youth I have been wafted, and to the old booksellers.
You do not find on every stall the poems of Bayly; but a copy in two
volumes has been discovered, edited by Mr. Bayly's widow (Bentley, 1844).
They saw the light in the same year as the present critic, and perhaps
they ceased to be very popular before he was breeched. Mr. Bayly,
according to Mrs. Bayly, "ably penetrated the sources of the human
heart," like Shakespeare and Mr. Howells. He also "gave to minstrelsy
the attributes of intellect and wit," and "reclaimed even festive song
from vulgarity," in which, since the age of Anacreon, festive song has
notoriously wallowed. The poet who did all this was born at Bath in Oct.
1797. His father was a genteel solicitor, and his great-grandmother was
sister to Lord Delamere, while he had a remote baronet on the mother's
side. To trace the ancestral source of his genius was difficult, as in
the case of Gifted Hopkins; but it was believed to flow from his maternal
grandfather, Mr. Freeman, whom his