a
took charge of the boy, and that his home, in vacation time, was with
her in Dublin or London. He writes like a youth who has always been
petted; the _frou-frou_ of fine ladies' petticoats is heard in all his
verses. But he had no fortune and no prospects; he was utterly, he
confesses, without ambition. The stern papa of Amasia had no notion of
bestowing her on the penniless Sylvius, and when the latter began to
court her in earnest, she rebuffed him. She tore up his love-letters,
she teased him by sending her black page to the window when he was
ogling for her in the street below, she told him he was too young for
her, and although she had no objection to his addressing verses to
her, she gave him no serious encouragement. She was to be married, he
hints, to some one of her own rank--some rich "country booby."

At last, early in 1698, in company with the Duchess of Grafton, and
possibly on the occasion of the second marriage of the latter, Amasia
was taken off to France, and Hopkins never saw her again. A year later
he received news of her death, and his little romance was over. He
became ill, and Dr. Gibbons, the great fashionable physician of the
day, was called in to attend him. The third volume closes by his
summoning the faithful and unupbraiding Martin back to his heart:

_Love lives in Sun-Shine, or that Storm, Despair,
But gentler Friendship Breathes a Mod'rate Air_.

And so Sylvius, with all his galaxy of lovely Irish ladies, his
fashionable Muses, and his trite and tortured fancy, disappears into
thin air.

The only literary man whom he mentions as a friend is George Farquhar,
himself a native of Londonderry, and about the same age as Hopkins.
This playwright seems to be sometimes alluded to as Daphnis, sometimes
under his own name. Before the performance of _Love and a Bottle_,
Hopkins prophesied for the author a place where

_Congreve, Vanbrook, and Wicherley must sit,
The great Triumvirate of Comick Wit_,

and later on he thought that even Collier himself ought to commend the
_Constant Couple, or A Trip to the Jubilee_. At the first performance
of this play, towards the close of 1699, Hopkins was greatly perturbed
by the presence of a lady who reminded him of Amasia, and when he
visited the theatre next he was less pleased with the play. He had a
vague and infelicitous scheme for turning _Paradise Lost_ into rhyme.
These are the only traces of literary bias. In other respects Hopkins
is i