of their
return with victory in their hands: and the dead corpses of Thiodolf
and Otter, clad in precious glittering raiment, looked down on them
from the High-seat, and the kindreds worshipped them and were glad;
and they drank the Cup to them before any others, were they Gods or
men.

In days of uncouth realism and unimaginative imitation, it is a high
pleasure to welcome work of this kind. It is a work in which all lovers
of literature cannot fail to delight.

_A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the Kindreds of the Mark_.
Written in Prose and in Verse by William Morris. (Reeves and Turner.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES
(_Woman's World_, April 1889.)

'In modern life,' said Matthew Arnold once, 'you cannot well enter a
monastery; but you can enter the Wordsworth Society.' I fear that this
will sound to many a somewhat uninviting description of this admirable
and useful body, whose papers and productions have been recently
published by Professor Knight, under the title of _Wordsworthiana_.
'Plain living and high thinking' are not popular ideals. Most people
prefer to live in luxury, and to think with the majority. However, there
is really nothing in the essays and addresses of the Wordsworth Society
that need cause the public any unnecessary alarm; and it is gratifying to
note that, although the society is still in the first blush of
enthusiasm, it has not yet insisted upon our admiring Wordsworth's
inferior work. It praises what is worthy of praise, reverences what
should be reverenced, and explains what does not require explanation.
One paper is quite delightful; it is from the pen of Mr. Rawnsley, and
deals with such reminiscences of Wordsworth as still linger among the
peasantry of Westmoreland. Mr. Rawnsley grew up, he tells us, in the
immediate vicinity of the present Poet-Laureate's old home in
Lincolnshire, and had been struck with the swiftness with which,

As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,

the memories of the poet of the Somersby Wold had 'faded from off the
circle of the hills'--had, indeed, been astonished to note how little
real interest was taken in him or his fame, and how seldom his works were
met with in the houses of the rich or poor in the very neighbourhood.
Accordingly, when he came to reside in the Lake Country, he endeavoured
to find out what of Wordsworth's memory among the men of the Dales still
lingere