I LADRI.

Meanwhile sire Joseph 'neath a tree*
Had ta'en the rest he needed sore,
For of the Holy Familie

He felt that he the burden bore;
And joy flowed all his heart amain,

And gladness filled his face with light,
To find once more the gentle twain
Had waked from sleep refreshed and bright.

The while he gave them tender care
Two forest ruffians rudely broke
Upon the scene, with brutal air,

And to the travellers harshly spoke :
"How dare you pass our ransom by?
But be ye Lazarus or Dives,
Ye may as well prepare to die,
Unless with gold ye buy your lives."+
Good Joseph grasped his staff, and threw
Himself before his sacred charge,
As guardian he, so leal and true,

Of his own breast had made a targe
To shield the loved ones from alarm;
But spake he fair and said: "Be sure
We have no wealth to work us harm,
You see that we are very poor."

Had those knaves known it, unseen bands
Of armed spirits hemmed them in,
With levin falchions in their hands,

While on each vengeful helm there bin
Aglow red tongues of burning flame;

For from his cradle to his death
Man's secret deeds, whate'er their aim,
Some unseen spirit witnesseth.

The thieves were fierce and keen for prize,
But then the old man was so weak,
And Mary, with her soft, mild eyes,
So helpless seemed, a single streak
Of pity crossed the heart of one,

Who to his comrade said: "Gadzo!
In this mean business I'll have none.
And you, methinks, had better no.

ment of popular devotion, and neither individuals, nor the uneducated in the aggregate, can be hired to be genial by the job. Carolsinging may therefore be set down as one of the things fast passing away. So, too, Christmas cakes, with the corners rounded off to represent the cradle, are being dispensed with, even as they themselves superseded the buns with crescent horns dedicated to Astarte. Next we may hear that Queen Victoria (God bless her !) has ceased to present gold, incense, and myrrh, at the feast of the Epiphany to the Chapel Royal, as she does, and all her predecessors on the

English throne have done, keeping up the custom of the Magi. All old customs are dying, yet long live Roast Beef and Plum Pudding. May they be the stand-by at Christmastide for ever. And for ever and ever may that charity flourish which considers it a duty incumbent on every Christian to let his poorer neighbour share in his basket and his store. In the country parts of our well-fed Dominion the advice may not be needed, but O, ye dwellers in cities! at blessed Christmastide, Remember the Poor. So God save you merry gentlemen, and give you happy cheer.

T was a singular development of the golden age of English poesy that the glory of one who was the king of poets in his own country should have appeared at first a subject of paradox and scandal in other lands. In Germany this was not so remarkable as in France. But in France, the best literary minds, and the most refined and highly cultured lovers of the drama, long cherished the idea. La Harpe was carried away by a species of anger, serious and sustained, against the overshadowing fame of Shakspere. He persistently sought to degrade his genius, and, for a time, he succeeded. Frenchmen lent a willing ear to the appeals of the critic who told them that their own best plays were not menaced by those of the Englishman. Voltaire, in the same breath, called Shakspere a great poet and a poor buffoon. At one time, he compared him to the author of the "Iliad," at another, to a clown in a company of ropedancers. Voltaire, as a young man, brought with him from England an ardent enthusiasm for Shaksperean scenes, and introduced them on the French stage as one of the bold novelties of the time. A decade or two afterwards he is found wasting a thousand strokes of sarcasm on the barbarism of the peerless dramatist, accumulating quotations from his plays in sportive mockery, and fulminating anathemas against him from the sanctuary of the Academy. Voltaire lived long enough to recant his worst errors, and redeem much of his ill-judged censure with honest praise. But even with him as its defender, the ancient fame of the French theatre was threatened long ere the sceptic with all his grinning mockeries had forever passed away. France, already nursing a revolution that was to appal the world with its horrors, passed silently through a revolution of a very different kind -a revolution of dramatic opinions and manners as well as of dramatic literature and taste. The English poet was crowned with a loyalty more unaffected, and ceremonials

more august, than his own willing subjects had ever dreamt of.

Although Shakspere was many-sided and many-hued, although all attempts to trace his individuality in his writings have utterly failed, he has at least shown himself to be this a representative Englishman, and the poet, above all others, who is dearest to the English heart. The splendour of his genius is unequalled, almost unapproached, in the literature of any country, but it is not unblemished. He has faults, not a few, constantly recurring in his drama, and some very odd and glaring faults. How came he, then, to be the idol of his English contemporaries, and the

"Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame," which was felt and acknowledged almost in a dawning literature? Why is it that he stands in English, as Goethe in German, literature, "the only one?" Why has he shed over English poesy a halo peculiarly its own?

In the period of England's literary life which closed with Spencer, the treasures of a poetical literature were rude but rich and manifold. English poetry had emerged from a condition of indigence and grossness, and begun to wear a garb of polish and refinement. Old English song had died with Caedmon, but Geoffrey Chaucer, in his unique imitations of Boccaccio and Petrarch, had revived beautiful models of artless verse and pleasant fictions innumerable. Surrey and Sidney had re-echoed the Italian poetry of the Renascence; but with the "Faerie Queene" the full glory of her new intellectual life broke upon England, and brought her medieval past face to face with a revival of letters. The influences of the time were no less favourable to this newly aroused poetic impulse. It was a time of insatiable restlessness and curiosity-of travel, of discovery, of inventiveness in the arts, of industrial development. There was a universal passion to go over "the whole of the past

and the whole of the globe." In England there was a general quickening of intelligence, an upgrowth of learning, an increase of wealth, and refinement, and leisure. A great national triumph had rolled away the dark, threatening clouds of foreign conquest. The storm of a mighty religious revolution had swept over the land. The imagination of the people was excited. Their old beacon lights were found to be false guides-their old havens of refuge full of peril. Religious controversy was active; the strifes of creeds and sectaries stimulated enquiry, and an intense yearning for new thoughts had seized the nation's mind. The Bible, of which the versions by the Puritans had become popular, was, in itself, a school of poetry. It was replete with images which enlivened the people's fancy, and emotions which stirred deeply the people's heart. The antique legends and ballads of the middle ages were all but discarded, and their place filled by this sacred legend of immortality. The rude translations of the Psalms were full of poetic fire. They were the war chaunts of the Reformation, and pæans of hope and triumph through all that troublous time. Poetry, which until then had been a mere pastime amidst the idleness of palaces and courts, had thus lent to it something of enthusiasm and earnestness. The study of the ancient languages also opened an exhaustless source of recollections. Translations were numerous, and supplied elements for a poetical literature that stimulated research. The images of the old classic authors assumed a kind of originality from being half disfigured by the confused conceptions which the multitude received of them. Greek and Roman learning was the bon ton of Elizabeth's court. The Queen herself quickened the literary zeal of her nobles by a simple rendition into English verse of Seneca's Hercules Furiosus. Her courtiers became students and ambitious to excel in a new field. Of dramatic productions there was no dearth. Although the stagecraft of the time had many imperfections, the spectacles which it presented, patronized as they were by the Court, and fostered by the growing prosperity of a peaceful period, lost much of their coarseness by the novelty of the enjoyment which they afforded. It was then that Marlowe produced his "Tomburlaine the Great" and other minor plays, and that the ennobled

Sackville, from whom "winsome Marie Stuart " received the message of her doom, wrote and exhibited in the English capital the tragedy of "Garbeduc."

The erudition of the Court, however, was not communicated to the people at large. But withal it had a latent influence which cropped out in many a quaint and fantastic form amongst the popular festivals and amusements. The mythology of the ancients was revived, and, on English soil under an English sky, were to be seen real spectacles that had only an imaginative existence amongst the people of a crumbling antiquity. The Queen's progress from shire to shire was a series of splendid processions. Chivalric entertainments and classic pageants awaited her at every turn. When she 'visited a courtier or nobleman, the Penates saluted her on the threshold of his castle or country seat, and the "herald Mercury" conducted her into the chamber of honour. All the surroundings of her place of sojourn were made to minister in a similar way to these whims of Majesty. Tribute was exacted from the culinary arts that supplied the royal table, and the metamorphoses of Ovid were conspicuously reproduced in the materials of the dessert; the pages that waited on Majesty were transformed into nymphs, and the long twilights were beguiled by the Nereids and Tritons who disported on the lake of the lordly demesne. In the early morning Diana, the huntress goddess, did obeisance to the Queen as she returned from the brisk pleasures of the chase. Every divinity in turn gave her of the first fruits of his empire. As she entered the old city of Norwich, attended with all the pageantry of her brilliant court, the fickle goddess, Love, stepped nimbly forth from an encircling crowd of grave civic dignitaries, and, as a compliment to her all-potent charms, presented her with a golden arrow, a gift which we are told Her Majesty, who then drew near to forty, received with gracious thanks. These and many other spectacles equally ludicrous, were not altogether vain, idle shows. They excited the popular imagination and influenced the popular taste. They were the devices of men who might have been much better employed, of lord high chamberlains, wise ministers, and keepers of the Queen's conscience, who thus amused and amazed the people by flattering the vanity of a woman who ruled them with an iron hand;