the "Friend's Passion for his Astrophel,"
printed with the Elegies of Spenser and others.

You knew--who knew not Astrophel?
(That I should live to say I knew,
And have not in possession still!)--
Things known permit me to renew--
Of him you know his merit such,
I cannot say--you hear--too much.

Within these woods of Arcady
He chief delight and pleasure took;
And on the mountain Partheny.
Upon the crystal liquid brook,
The Muses met him every day,
That taught him sing, to write, and say.

When he descended down the mount,
His personage seemed most divine:
A thousand graces one might count
Upon his lovely chearful eyne.
To hear him speak, and sweetly smile,
You were in Paradise the while,

_A sweet attractive kind of grace;
A full assurance given by looks;
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of Gospel books--_
I trow that count'nance cannot lye,
Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.

* * * * *

Above all others this is he,
Which erst approved in his song,
That love and honour might agree,
And that pure love will do no wrong.
Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame
To love a man of virtuous name.

Did never Love so sweetly breathe
In any mortal breast before:
Did never Muse inspire beneath
A Poet's brain with finer store.
He wrote of Love with high conceit,
And beauty rear'd above her height.

Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running into rage) in
the Poem,--the last in the collection accompanying the above,--which
from internal testimony I believe to be Lord Brooke's,--beginning with
"Silence augmenteth grief,"--and then seriously ask himself, whether
the subject of such absorbing and confounding regrets could have been
_that thing_ which Lord Oxford termed him.

NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that he ever
deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life.
He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way
that were going in; but he never went in of his own head. Yet the
office of the Morning Post newspaper stood then just where it does
now--we are carrying you back, Reader, some thirty years or more--with
its gilt-globe-topt front facing that emporium of our artists' grand
Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish, that we had observed the same
abstinence wit