pathies, and tastes, and weaknesses, with as keen and
true an edge as when the living world of the old Swabian
poet winced under its earliest utterance.

Humorous in the high pure sense, every laugh which
it gives may have its echo in a sigh, or may glide into
it as excitement subsides into thought; and yet, for
those who do not care to find matter there either
for thought or sadness, may remain innocently as a
laugh.

Too strong for railing, too kindly and loving for
the bitterness of irony, the poem is, as the world itself,
a book where each man will find what his nature
enables him to see, which gives us back each our own
image, and teaches us each the lesson which each of us
desires to learn.

____

THE COMMONPLACE BOOK OF RICHARD HILLES

In the Library at Balliol College, Oxford, there is a
manuscript which, for want of a better name, I may call
a Commonplace Book of an English gentleman who
lived in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Its
contents display, beyond any other single volume which
I have met with, the mental furniture of an average-educated
man of the time. There are stories in prose
and verse, collections of proverbs, a dissertation on
Horticulture, a dissertation on Farriery, a treatise of
Confession, a Book of Education, a Book of Courtesy, a
Book of "the Whole Duty" of Man; mercantile entries,
discourses of arithmetic, recipes, prescriptions, marvels
of science or pseudo-science, conundrums, tables of the
assize of food; the laws respecting the sale of meat,
bread, beer, wine, and other necessaries; while above
and beyond all are a collection in various handwritten
of ballads, songs, hymns, and didactic poems of a religious
kind, some few of which have been met with elsewhere;
but of the greater number of them no other copy, I
believe, exists.

The owner and compiler was a certain Richard Hilles.
From the entries of the births and deaths of his children
on a fly-leaf, I gather that in 1518 he lived at a place
called Hillend, near King's Langley, in Hertfordshire.
The year following he had removed to London, where
he was apparently in business; and among his remarks
on the management of vines and fruit trees in his
"Discourse on Gardens," he mentions incidentally that he
had been in Greece and on the coast of Asia Minor. A
brief "Annual Register" is carried down as far as 1535,
in which year he perhaps died. One of his latest entries
is the execution of Bishop Fisher and of Si