have
taken no account of the poetical peeresses, or I should have had to
dwell upon the achievements of such ladies as Sidney's sister, Lady
Pembroke; the Duchess of Newcastle, the Countess of Winchilsea, the
Baroness Nairne, and so on. Enough, indeed, has been said to show how
prominent a part the peerage has played in the history of English
poetry--not, indeed, in the front rank, in which (omitting Lord
Tennyson) it is represented only by Byron, but in the second, where
Montrose (for example) is eminent, and wherever, in short, the
rhetorical, the amatory, and the witty elements are in the ascendant.

THE PRAISE OF THAMES.

Afluent versifier of to-day has complained that, though many a poet has
'dearer made the names' of Tweed and Nith and Doon, and what not, no one
has 'sung our Thames;' and he goes on especially to rate 'green Kent and
Oxfordshire and Middlesex,' because those counties have offered, he
says, no rhythmical tribute to our premier stream. Now, the Thames has
not, perhaps, found many laureates of late. The glories of Henley may be
celebrated annually in the comic or 'society' press, but in these times
we hear more, no doubt, of sewage and steam-launches than of any other
phenomena of the Thames. We are a practical generation, with a keen eye
to business, and disposed to take not only as read, but as written, the
praises which might well be bestowed upon the river even as it is.

If, however, the Thames does not often or greatly inspire the rhymers of
to-day, it cannot, certainly, be described as songless. On the contrary,
it has received from the poets more magnificent and more frequent
eulogium than any of its compeers. If one goes back even so far as
Spenser, one finds that writer picturing it in one poem as 'noble
Thamis'--a 'lovely bridegroom,' 'full, fresh and jolly,' 'all decked in
a robe of watchet hew,' and adorned by a coronet 'in which were many
towres and castels set;' while, in another work from the same hand, it
figures as a 'gentle river,' is characterized as 'christall Thamis,' and
is lauded for its 'pure streames' and 'sweete waters.' Chapman, in his
'Ovid's Banquet of Sense,' discourses eloquently of the 'wanton Thamysis
that hastes to greet The brackish coast of old Oceanus':

'And as by London's bosom she doth fleet,
Casts herself proudly through the bridge's twists,
Where, as she takes again her crystal feet,
She curls her silver hair like amourists,
Smo