n it
really is. Few poets have ever been more successful with songs for
music: the "Brookside" (commonly called from its refrain, "The beating
of my own heart"), the famous and really fine "Strangers Yet," are the
best known, but there are many others. Lord Houghton undoubtedly had no
strong vein of poetry. But it was always an entire mistake to represent
him as either a fribble or a sentimentalist, while with more inducements
to write he would probably have been one of the very best critics of his
age.

It is necessary once more to approach the unsatisfactory brevity of a
catalogue in order to mention, since it would be wrong to omit, Sir
Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), an Irish writer who produced some pleasant
and spirited work of ordinary kinds, and laboured very hard to achieve
that often tried but seldom achieved adventure, the rendering into
English poetry of Irish Celtic legends and literature; Alfred Domett
(1811-87), author of the New Zealand epic of _Ranulf and Amohia_ and
much other verse, but most safely grappled to English poetry as
Browning's "Waring"; W. B. Scott (1812-90), an outlying member of the
Prae-Raphaelite School in art and letters, in whom for the most part
execution lagged behind conception both with pen and pencil; Charles
Mackay (1814-89), an active journalist who wrote a vast deal in verse
and prose, his best things perhaps being the mid-century "Cholera
Chant," the once well-known song of "A good time coming," and in a
sentimental strain the piece called "O, ye Tears"; and Mrs. Archer
Clive, the author of the remarkable novel of _Paul Ferroll_, whose _IX.
Poems by V._ attracted much attention from competent critics in the
doubtful time of poetry about the middle of the century, and are really
good.

Not many writers, either in prose or poetry, give the impression of
never having done what was in them more than William Edmonstoune Aytoun,
who was born in 1813 and died in 1865. He was a son-in-law of
"Christopher North," and like him a pillar of _Blackwood's Magazine_, in
which some of his best things in prose and verse appeared. He divided
himself between law and literature, and in his rather short life rose to
a Professorship in the latter and a Sheriffdom in the former, deserving
the credit of admirably stimulating influence in the first capacity and
competent performance in the second. He published poems when he was
only seventeen. But his best work consists of the famous _Bon Gaultier
Bal