after an illness of a few days' duration, he died on the 12th of August, 1848, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. He had been greatly beloved by his work-people, and a large body of them followed him to the grave. The inhabitants of Chesterfield evinced their respect for him by closing their shops, suspending business, and joining in the funeral procession. No public honours or rewards ever came in his way. He was indeed repeatedly pressed to accept the title of knight, and on one occasion the Government offered him a piece of patronage: this was the appointment to the office of a letter-carrier, with fourteen shillings a week and sixteen miles a day. This means of extending his influence Mr. Stephenson refused. We have not space to attempt any delineation of his character; and it is needless. His character is drawn in those strong and manly lines which no one can mistake. Everything about him was genuine : his mechanical genius, his indomitable resolution, his intense honesty, his kindness of heart, his industry, his frugality, his generosity, his sound good sense, his unaffected modesty. He was an honour, as well as a great benefactor, to his country and to mankind. We do not know that there ever lived an individual to whom each separate inhabitant of Great Britain owes so much of real tangible advantage. His life is a fine lesson to every one. Honesty is the best policy, after all. And we do not know but that the working man may apply the lines of Robert Nicoll to George Stephenson, the Railway Engineer, with at least us much propriety as to the erratic genius of whom they were written : Before the proudest of the earth, We stand, with an uplifted brow : VIII. OULITA THE SERF* HIS volume has no preface, and no notes save two or three of a line's length each. Its title-page bears nothing beyond the words, Oulita the Serf; a Tragedy. But the advertisements which foretold its publication added a fact which made us open the book with a very different feeling from that with which we should have taken up an ordinary anonymous play, a fact which at once excited high expectations, and which, we doubt not, has already introduced Oulita to a wide circle of readers, each prepared to gauge its merits by a very severe test and a very high standard. The forthcoming volume was announced as Oulita the Serf; a Tragedy: by the Author of Friends in Council' The disguise of the author of that work is becoming ragged. We have found, in more than one library, where a special glory of binding was *Oulita the Serf. A Tragedy. London: 1858. bestowed upon the book and its charming sequel, that, though the title-page bore no name, the volumes were marked with a name which is well and honourably known. And indeed there are few books which are so calculated as Friends in Council to make the reader wish to know who is the author whom he has learned to revere and love: and surely the language has none which, in its gentle playfulness, its intense honesty, its comprehensive sympathy, its earnestness so tempered with the desire to do justice to all, affords its writer less reason for seeking any disguise. Yet it is not for us to add the author's name to a title-page which the author has chosen to send nameless into the world: though we may be permitted to say that, whoever may be the writer of the works to which we have been alluding, though we never exchanged words with him, and never saw him, still, in common with an increasing host of readers, we cannot think of him as other than a kind and sympathetic friend. Accordingly, we expected a great deal from this new work. We were not entirely taken by surprise, indeed, when we saw it announced: for Ellesmere, in Friends in Council, makes several quotations from the works of a certain obscure dramatist,' which are likely to set the thoughtful reader inquiring. And whoever shall carefully collate the advertisements of the late Mr. Picker ing's publications will discover that the author of Oulita published a good many years ago an historical drama, entitled King Henry the Second, and a tragedy entitled Catherine Douglas, whose heroine is the strong-hearted Scottish maiden who thrust her arm into the staple of a door from which the bolt had been removed, in the desperate hope of thus retarding for a moment the entrance of the conspirators who murdered James the First. But these plays are comparatively unknown; and probably very many readers who have been delighted by that graceful, unaffected prose, were quite unaware that its writer was endowed with the faculty of verse. We could not fail, indeed, to discern in his prose works the wide, genial sympathy, the deep thoughtfulness, the delicate sensitiveness, of the true poet. And his talent, we could also discover from these, is essentially dramatic. The characters in Friends in Council have each their marked individuality; while yet that individuality is maintained and brought out, not by coarse caricature, but by those delicate and natural touches which make us feel that we are conversing with real human beings, and not with mere names in a book. It is an extremely easy thing to make us recognise a character when he reappears upon the stage, by making him perpetually repeat some silly and vulgar phrase. Smith is the man who never enters without roaring 'It's all serene:' Jones is the in |