THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER. Oн, I know the world is a weary place Yet I see the promise of heaven gleam On this sorrowful earth of ours, That God's sea will whiten life's darkened stream, God's sun will open life's flowers. 'Mid the western forest I sit me down, Where the church bells never ring: My hands they are rough, and my brow is brown, But yet, when the work of my day is done, Then my heart grows soft with the thought of one Who has been ten years with God. Just a little lass, who was fair to me, But what can the beauty they talk of be When I think how the angels sing above, She lived in a quiet country place, Where even God's dumb things loved her face, No earthly pride save her mother's praise, Then at last, a break in the happy days, And I dared not ask them For sight of the holy dead: for what was I? I looked on her bier as they bore it by, "Twas long since I'd joined in a godly work, Or gone where God's people meet, But next Sabbath morning I went to kirk, And gazed on her empty seat. For I could not carry her in my heart But when in God's service I took my part, And she's near me now, as I sit alone And she soothes my heart like a mother's tome So in many a quiet place, I trow, God's servants may dwell unseen, But in loving patience God sits on high, Sunday Magazine. CHILDREN ON THE SHORE. O why won't they leave us to our play? We can dig it a cunning little bed, Another pretty house in its stead; We do not mind the sun in our eyes When it makes such a dazzle of the world, That we cannot tell the sea from the skies, Nor look where the flying drops are hurled. The shells that we gather are so fair, The birds and the clouds are so kind, And the winds are so merry with our hair It is only the People that we mind! Papa, if you come so very near, We can't build the library, to-day; We think you are tired of being here, And perhaps you would like to go away. There are just one or two we won't refuse, If they come by, to help us now and then, But we want only friends to be of use, And not all those idle grown men; Perhaps, if we hurry very much. And don't lose an instant of the day, O children thus working with the heart! Can never make your toil be in vain ; JUST PUBLISHED AT THIS OFFICE : LINDA TRESSEL, by the Author of Nina Balatka. Price 38 cts. ALL FOR GREED, by the BARONESS BLAZE DE BURY. Price 38 cts. PREPARING FOR PUBLICATION AT THIS OFFICE: A HOUSE OF CARDS. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS. For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10. TENNYSON AND LONGFELLOW. THE London Judy has this squib: Mr. Longfellow goeth on a visit to the Poet "Should you ask me, H. W. L., We will smoke the fragrant peace-pipe ; The reply of Mr. Longfellow must inevitably be as follows: "I hold it truth with those who say (I don't exactly know their names) That poets who have equal fames Should meet thus in a friendly way. Tho' ocean waves they raise and fall (And I was ill when tempest tossed,) 'Tis better to've been ill and crossed Than never to have crossed at all!" Mr. Tennyson (loq.) : Arrived at the bedroom door, it is perfectly certain he will then say: "If you're waking, call me early, call me early, Alfred dear, I find it, after London, really very pleasant here; And as a walk ere breakfast I admire, if fine the day, Let us go to-morrow morning-yes, I only hope we may." At this point the American bard retires to his couch, shutting his door. His host, however, in these words: gives a final vent to his Longfellownian feelings At Duty's summons; - then Hope's answering light, "Comrade, I have dined extremely well; and Clear as the red star watching o'er the earth, as since early dawn I have tasted naught save beer, and of that only one small horn, You may guess that I enjoyed it; and this truth the poet sings, That, no matter how ethereal, poets suffer hunger's stings. If perhaps that you'll excuse me, I should like to go to bed, Glows forth afresh on life's rekindled hearth. B. - AFTER a brief but very pleasant sojourn in London, Professor Longfellow has left for the Isle of Wight, after visiting which island for a few days he will cross over to the Continent. Switzerland and Italy will occupy the poet until next May, when our distinguished guest will return to London, when it may be hoped that he will accept a public demonstration of the affecWhereupon Mr. Tennyson will ring for can- tionate regard in which he is held by men of every class. And in slumber steep my senses, also rest my weary head." dles, and escort his guest to his room. Athenæum. GARRICK has not been fortunate in his biographers. He has had three- Murphy, Davies, and Boaden. The two first wrote lives of him which have gone through several editions; the last wrote a Memoir, prefixed to two bulky quartos of Garrick's Correspondence, which were published in 1831. Murphy and Davies knew the great actor. They were members of his company at Drury Lane, Murphy, during a period which, though brief, was long enough to satisfy even his vanity that the stage was not the true sphere for his versatile and ambitious genius, and also to secure him an unenviable niche in Churchill's Rosciad; and Davies from 1752 to 1762, when he quitted the boards, partly through dread of Churchill, partly because he found he could not attend both to his shop - he was a bookseller-and to the business of the stage. 'Nobody,' said Johnson, 'can write the life of a man but those who have eat, and drank, and lived in social intercourse with him.' But a man may have done all these things, and yet write a life very badly. So it was with both Murphy and Davies; for there was bitterness in their hearts of an old standing. Murphy as a dramatic author, and Davies as an actor, had fancied wrongs to revenge, and the humiliation to resent of benefits received and injuries forgiven; and the leaven of their ancient grudges tainted both their works. But Murphy's, besides being venomous, is inaccurate, and, what is more surprising in a man whose dialogue in comedy was terse and sparkling, it is extremely prosy. That of Davies, while much less coloured by prejudice, and upon the whole sensibly and agreeably written, is often incorrect in its details, and far from complete in its treatment of the subject. We should have had very different books from both, could they have dreamed that their own letters to Garrick, with the drafts of his replies, had been preserved, and were one day to rise up in judgment against their ingratitude and injustice to one who had shown them signal forbearance, and loaded them with repeated favours. These letters, with the rest of Garrick's Correspondence, which he had carefully preserved and docquetted, probably with a view to an Autobiography at some future date, were in Boaden's hands. He had not known Garrick either on the stage or in private. But these documents, with such information as he might have obtained from Mrs. Garrick, whom he did know, were enough to have enabled him to produce a satisfactory life. Boaden, however, was not the man for the work. He had neither the sympathetic imagination, the discriminating judgment, nor the vivacity of style, which it demanded; and his 'Memoir' is meagre in details, and most colourless and jejune in treatment. That he did not even make a judicious selection of the Correspondence which he edited is now certain. Most valuable as much of it is, not a little could well have been spared to make room for what he omitted. The whole Correspondence having come many years afterwards into the hands of Mr. John Forster, those who cared for such inquiries were taken by surprise by the announcement in a note to his Life of Goldsmith' (vol. i. p. 242), that the letters which Boaden had not published would 'form the most striking and valuable contribution that has yet been made to the great actor's history.' This statement was in some measure confirmed by the quotations given by Mr. Forster from a series of Garrick's early letters to his family; and curiosity was still further whetted by the appearance in the same gentleman's elaborate Essays on Churchill and Foote of other letters from the same source, scarcely less interesting from the light which they threw upon Garrick's character and his relations to these and others of his contemporaries. It is to be regretted that a judicious and well-edited selection of these papers should not have been published, and left to speak for itself; or, at all events, that Mr. Forster, or some other writer of unquestionable skill, should not have worked them up into a Life, that might have taken place in literature worthy of the great actor's repu tation. Instead of this, they have been entrusted to the author of these volumes, who has produced a work which assuredly | one person he constantly thrusts what is, in does not answer that condition. fact, a note about somebody else, and then goes on with the main thread of his narrative in a way that makes it impossible to know of which he is speaking. So little master, too, of the simplest rules of composition is this gentleman, who has undertaken to give the world a critical estimate of the literary merits of Lamb and Sterne, that he can fill page upon page with sentences such as these: p. 323.) Like Johnson's friend Birch, Mr. Fitzgerald seems to be a dead hand at a life.' Within two years or so he has grappled with Charles Lamb's and Sterne's, and now Garrick's is before us in two volumes, that number together nearly a thousand pages. Like all hasty literary work it is much too long. If lives are to be written on this scale, we must, as Sydney Smith said, get back to the days of Methusaleh, when men's years were counted by hundreds, and not "This foolish proceeding was welcomed by the by tens. But length is not its only or its town with delight, now rather famished for want worst fault. It wants accuracy, judgment last thing in the world he dreamed, that his of real nutriment.' (v. ii. p. 157.) It was the in selection, and method in arrangement; friend would think of entering into opposition and is, besides, at once tawdry and slovenly against him.' (Ibid. p. 184.) A complete in style. Mr. Fitzgerald is merciless to the collection of these Garrick pamphlets would be inaccuracies of other people. His own are curious. The British Museum is a very imlegion. He talks, for example, of Garrick's perfect gathering, but whose number is still very when he means Thompson's, Tancred and considerable.' (v. i. note p. 244.) On one Sigismunda' (vol. ii. p. 121), of the great May night, '57, Garrick must have been brought Earl of Chatham,' instead of Lord Chester-word of the strange and dramatic scene.' (v. i. field (vol. i. p. 75), —the great Earl of Chatham in 1737!-places the death of Foote, not at Dover, but at a lonely French port' (vol. ii., p. 250), and tells us (vol. i., 224) that a speech which Garrick wrote for Macbeth's last scene, and which has not within the memory of playgoers been spoken on the stage, will always keep its place' there. The same blundering heedlessness pervades Mr. Fitzgerald's style. Here are a few examples of his respect for syntax. Carrying the precious wares in their pockets that was to make all their fortunes' (vol. i., p. 35). There was always crowded houses' (Ibid., p. 335). The pupil whom he fancied was fast asleep below' (Ibid., p. 30). The confusion of Mr. Fitzgerald's sentences, amusing at first, becomes irritating by repetition. In one place he informs us that a leading wit and critic at Bedford Coffee-house was to be seen there nightly after he was dead. Here, too, was seen that wild and witty and drunken Dr. Barrowby, who, after a jovial life, had died the death that so often attends on a jovial life' (vol. i., p. 283). But the shock of such nonsense is tolerable, compared to the bewildering effect produced by Mr. Fitzgerald's utter disregard of method, or the simple rules which regulate the use of the proInto the middle of a passage about noun. Nor is Mr. Fitzgerald more accurate in statement than in style. Another striking defect of his book is the absence of reference to his authorities. Even where he does mention them it is in such vague terms as Cradock,' Kirkman,' 'Stockdale,' 'Cooke.' The general reader is not much the wiser for such a reference as this. He is not likely to know even of the existence of Stockdale's or Cradock's Memoirs of themselves, or of Kirkman's or Cooke's Memoirs of Macklin. And even when Mr. Fitzgerald condescends to furnish this faint clue to his authority, it is no easy task to verify his statements, for as a rule he gives no citation of either volume or page. The value of any statement in a work based, as this is, entirely on what other people have written, must of course depend wholly on the character of the source from which it comes. But Mr. Fitzgerald systematically deprives his readers of this test. Page after page is made up of passages manufactured out of Tate Wilkinson's, Mrs. Bellamy's, Stockdale's, Davies's and other memoirs, without a word of acknowledgment. The letters published by Boaden are quoted, or their contents used, at every turning; but, as a rule, no -a rare occurrence |