BIOGRAPHICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. THE HE authorities for these notes, in addition to special biographies and the biographical notes scattered through various volumes of selections, are, Victorian Poets, by Edmund Clarence Stedman, eleventh edition, 1886; Celebrities of the Century, edited by Lloyd Sanders, 1886; Men of the Reign, 1885, and Men of the Time, twelfth edition, 1887, both edited by Thomas Humphrey Ward. The authors marked with an asterisk (*) are still (1887) living. * AÏDÉ, HAMILTON. He is the author of a number of novels, and has quite a reputation as the author of the words of several popular songs. He has published in poetry Eleonore and other Poems, 1856; Rhymes and Recitations, 1882. * BAILEY, PHILIP JAMES (1816). Born at Nottingham; spent two sessions at the University of Glasgow, 1831-1833, and in the latter year commenced the study of law, and in 1840 was called to the bar. He has published Festus, 1839; The Angel World, 1850; The Mystic, 1855; The Age (a satire), 1856; The Universal Hymn, 1867. BRONTÈ, EMILY JANE (1818-1848). Born at Thornton in Yorkshire, and daughter of the Rev. Patrick Brontè, whose strange and eccentric conduct has been variously attributed to an ungovernable temper and partial insanity. In 1820 the family removed to Haworth Vicarage, where in not quite a year Mrs. Brontè died, and the care of the six motherless children, all under seven years of age, devolved upon the eldest daughter Maria. In 1824 Emily and Charlotte attended a school established for clergymen's daughters, at Cowan's Bridge, near Haworth, and which is supposed to have furnished the original of "Lowood," in Charlotte's novel, Jane Eyre. In 1825 they returned home, where Emily spent the next eleven years, when she accepted a position as teacher in a large school near Halifax. She was however compelled to resign the position in less than a year, on account of the positive injury done to her health, which in her case absence from home seems to have always produced. In 1842 she spent, in company with Charlotte, a short time at Brussels, from which city the sisters were suddenly recalled by the death of their aunt, Miss Branwell. Emily from that time never left Haworth Vicarage. She was a woman whose bravery amounted almost to stoicism, and her life, sad enough in itself, was rendered amost tragic by the utter eclipse of all the hopes which she and her sisters had centred in their brother Branwell, and whose talents they may have fondly exaggerated, but whose career was as complete a failure as excessive drink and lack of all purpose in life could make. She published in conjunction with her two sisters, Charlotte and Anne, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846. The stanzas Last Lines were found in her desk after her death. She published only one novel, Wuthering Heights, 1847. BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT (1809-1861). Born at Hope End, near Ledbury, and daughter of Mr. Moulton, a wealthy Jamaica planter, who afterwards added the name of Barrett to his own, making it Moulton-Barrett. The family subsequently removed to Gloucester Place, London, and the only instructors Mrs. Browning seemed to have had were her father, a man of much cultivation, and her blind and learned friend Hugh Stuart Boyd, to whom the poem Wine of Cyprus was addressed, and with whom she read not only classical Greek literature but also the works of the Greek Fathers. She was in addition an omnivorous reader of every kind of literature, not excluding the works of contemporary poets, among whom Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge made a great impression upon her. In 1837 she broke a blood |