or Constantius. It found an admiring
and enthusiastic audience and received unstinted praise from the
critics. One wrote, "Lord Byron has produced nothing equal to it;" and
another, "Scott has nothing so intellectual or so elevated among his
exquisite sketches."

'Mary Tudor,' a drama written two years before his death in 1846, is his
"most considerable work," says his son, and "an expression of his
sympathy with great qualities obscured by great errors and great
calamities." The sonnet was however the form of composition he
preferred, and as a sonneteer he will be remembered. His sonnets are
mainly historical, though he wrote also some religious and descriptive
ones which Wordsworth considered "the most perfect of our age." His
earlier ones, modeled after those of Petrarch and Filicaja, are inferior
in imagery, phraseology, and nobility of thought to those produced under
the influence of Wordsworth, a poet whose genius De Vere was among the
first to acknowledge, and whose friendship he regarded as one of the
chief honors of his life.

Like his friend, De Vere was a patriot, and in his historical sonnets he
has recorded his love for the land of his remoter ancestors, whereas in
the 'Lamentations of Ireland' he has expressed with great ardor his love
for the land of his birth. In 1842 he published 'The Song of Faith,'
which with the exception of a few translations was all he gave the world
in twenty years. Devoted to his occupations as a country gentleman, and
being of a singularly modest disposition, he neither loved nor courted
fame, nor found in it any incentive to action.

Sir Aubrey De Vere was not in the modern acceptance of the term a
national poet, nor was he, as so many of his contemporaries, anti-Irish.
He modeled his poems on the great English writers, but all he wrote is
pervaded with a deep sympathy for Ireland, and that at a time when such
sympathy was rare.

THE CRUSADERS

The flattering crowd wreathe laurels for the brow
Of blood-stained chief or regal conqueror;
To Caesar or the Macedonian bow;
Meteors of earth that set to rise no more:
A hero-worship, as of old? Not now
Should chieftain bend with servile reverence o'er
The fading pageantry of Paynim lore.
True heroes they whose consecrated vow
Led them to Jewry, fighting for the Cross;
While not by Avarice lured, or lust of power
Inspired, they combated that Christ should