found in England 'a nest of hollow bosoms, which
he fills with treacherous crowns,' adding,

'What might'st thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural?'

Here, then, is a lesson for our times. What Shakespeare felt to be true
in his own day is equally, nay more, true now--that England, 'set in a
silver sea,' is safe from all assaults, save those which she may suffer
at the hands of her own 'degenerate and ingrate' sons.

HEREDITY IN SONG.

It is said that the verses in a recent number of _Macmillan's Magazine_,
entitled 'In Capri,' and signed 'W. Wordsworth,' are from the pen of a
grandson of the famous author of 'The Excursion.' They are gracefully
written, in an agreeable rhythm, and with much command of felicitous
expression. If, therefore, the writer has indeed the relationship to the
great Wordsworth which rumour assigns him, the fact is interesting, and
suggests some considerations as to the transmission of the poetic
faculty from one generation to another.

One might have thought that this transmission would have been tolerably
common; that the sons at least, if not the grandsons, of a genuine poet
could scarcely fail to inherit something of their progenitor's peculiar
powers. One might even have supposed that poetry would run--as other
things have run--in families, making the 'bards' almost a _gens_, or
class, by themselves. Poetry, after all, is an affair mainly of the
temperament--of fancy and imagination, of feeling and passion; and these
are qualities which one might have imagined would be handed down, not
greatly impaired, from father to son, and so on, for at least a fairly
prolonged period.

There have, indeed, been instances in which literary capacity has been a
special characteristic of persons in close relationship to each other:
one thinks at once of the Sheridans, the Coleridges, the Wordsworths,
and others who have been notable for their productiveness in prose and
verse. But the cases in which the purely poetic gift--the vision and the
faculty divine--has been inherited and exercised are few indeed. A
certain intellectual power will mark the members of a family, and
exhibit itself in various attractive ways, but less in the domain of
poetry than any other. It would seem that sheer mental force can be
communicated, but that the higher qualities of the human spirit are not
so readily transmitted; are, in fact, hardly transmissible, at any rate
in qu