Lake, then a new work; and the soldiers lay still, only now and then interrupting the reader with cheers.

Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1772. He studied law, but was chiefly interested in history and the Scottish legends. He began his real career as a poet when he was about thirty-five years old, and went on with it ten years. Then he left verse-making and turned to novel-writing, which he kept up constantly for the rest of his life. For his services to literature he was made a baronet in 1820. Out of both his poems and his novels he made a great deal of money; but he became involved in the bankruptcy of a firm of publishers, which left him $400,000 in debt. The debt he paid off finally, but the struggle wore him out and killed him. Scott was one of the most friendly, generous, loyal men who ever wrote English, and in his own time he was perhaps of all authors the best-loved.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), Thomas Moore (17791852) and Thomas Hood (1799-1845) were also men of reputation in their own day, though of nothing like the popularity of Scott. Campbell is remembered for his patriotic and martial verse-Ye Mariners of England is a famous national song. Moore was an Irishman, a true song-writer; many of his poems, such as Oft in the Stilly Night, The Last Rose of Summer, and The Harp that Once Through Tara's Halls are best known with their musical settings. His longest poem, very popular in its own day, is Lalla Rookh. Hood was chiefly a humorista man something like, in spirit, our own Oliver Wendell Holmes, never too comical to be unsympathetic.

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was the most brilliant essayist of his day. He is better known for his prose than for his poetry. Adopting the nom de plume of "Elia," he wrote scores of papers, intimate and whimsical, which

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

POEMS OF WORDSWORTH

THE REVERIE OF POOR SUSAN

Ar the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years: Poor Susan has pass'd by the spot, and has heard

In the silence of morning the song of the bird.

'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale
Down which she so often has tripp'd with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.

5

IO

She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colors have all pass'd away from her eyes!

15

SIMON LEE THE OLD HUNTSMAN

In the sweet shire of Cardigan,
Not far from pleasant Ivor Hall,
An old man dwells, a little man,-
'Tis said he once was tall.