ART. II.-Homes and Haunts of the most eminent British Poets. By WILLIAM HOWITT. 2 vols. New-York: Harper & Brothers. 1847.

MANY thanks to thee, friend Howitt, for these pleasant volumes. They are neither biographical nor critical, but occupy just that ground which no one is better qualified to cultivate than thyself. And there are more to come. The dramatists, with the exception of the greatest of them all, are passed by, with some dear masters of the lyre, of whose homes and haunts we have almost the promise in thy brief advertisement. Disappoint us not in this matter; and though it may cost thee thousands of miles of travel, as did the volumes before us, yet is there abundant treasure in the poetic commonwealth of England; and no other living man may follow in the vein thou hast opened; or, if he follow, may find those gems and precious things, and give them to us in the freshness of thine own simplicity and singleness of purpose. Tell us about the smooth Waller; and about Young, merry and jovial in his life, but sad and sombre in his poetry. Make us better acquainted with Akenside and Beattie, and the gentle Allan Ramsay. We would know something more, too, than the mere biographer or the professional critics tell us of our dear friends-friends they are, though we never saw them-Milman, whose heroics Byron slandered; kind Miss Mitford, and stately Mrs. Norton; Browning, a true poet, less admired than she to whom he gave his name, when he blotted from fame's fair temple-Elizabeth Barrett: tell us of them both, now that they two are one; and leave room in thy volumes for all that thou mayst glean of him, the recently departed, who caused the tear and smile so pleasingly to blend, and whose name will live while oppression riots on half-paid toil, or man wears linen. But let us turn from what we wish to what we have; and with a well-earned compliment to the publishers, who have given us these volumes in a style most befitting, in the perfection of typography, and with striking embellishments, sit we down together, gentle reader, to the feast before us.

As was most proper, the genial CHAUCER heads the list; albeit the lapse of five centuries renders it extremely difficult to track his haunts, more especially as former biographers seem to have confirmed Tyrwhitt's assertion, that just nothing of him is really known. That he was born in London, he tells us himself; but whether he was educated at Oxford or at Cambridge is uncertain, The probability seems to be that he studied at both universities.

He became in early life a courtier, and, according to Rymer, received many solid tokens of royal regard. In the thirty-ninth year of his age the king granted him an annuity of twenty marks. Seven years after, he was made controller of the custom of wools, &c., in the port of London, and had a grant for life of a pitcher of wine daily. On the accession of the second Richard he had another annuity of twenty marks, and from that sovereign, as well as from Henry IV., he received many tokens of special favor. He was, successively, envoy to Genoa and ambassador to France, where, according to Froissart, he conducted a treaty of marriage between the young prince of Wales and the French king's daughter.

But the life of the "father of our truly English poetry," as he is justly styled, was not all sunshine. Owing to his connection with the Lollards, and for other reasons not so well known, he incurred the king's displeasure, was obliged to surrender his annuities, and to flee from his native land. On his return he was imprisoned in the Tower, where he was treated with great rigor; and on his liberation, which was effected not without dishonor to himself, he wrote his "Testament of Love," in which he complains "of being berafte out of dignitie of office, in which he made a gatheringe of worldly godes." His great work, the Canterbury Tales, was written when he had reached his sixtieth year; remained in manuscript more than half a century after his death, which occurred in the year 1400; and was first issued from the press of the celebrated Caxton. Our author says:

"Spite of the rude state of the language when he wrote, the splendor of his genius beams and burns gloriously through its inadequate vehicle.... The language has gone on perfecting and polishing; a host of glorious names and glorious works have succeeded Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, making England affluent in its literary fame as any nation on earth; but, from his distant position, the father of English poetry beams like a star of the first magnitude in the eternal hemisphere of genius.... The life and the characters he has represented to us are a portion of the far past, rescued for us from the oblivion that has overwhelmed all that age besides. To the latest ages men will read and say: 'Thus, in the days of Wiclif, of John of Gaunt, and Richard II., did men and women look, and act, and think, and feel; thus did a great poet live among them, and send them down to us, and to all posterity, ten thousand times more faithfully preserved than by all the arts of Egypt and the East.' Quaint as they are, they are the very quintessence of human nature. They can never die. They can never grow old."

But who reads Chaucer nowadays? Few, indeed, very few. The attempt is too much like working one's passage; and readers

dislike toil, and preter the ease of the railroad, and, if it might be, the speed of the electric telegraph. With the multitude the enjoyment and the pleasure are found not by the way, but at the journey's end; not among the jewels of the author, but at the finis of the printer. It is some sort of satisfaction to know that the loss is their own; and gratifying to transcribe, here, the joyous outburst of one who has studied his antique language and uncouth spelling, and found therein an ample recompense. Labor ipse voluptas.

"There is an elastic geniality in his spirit, a buoyant music in his numbers, a soul of enjoyment in his whole nature, that mark him at once as a man of a thousand; and we feel in the charm that bears us along a strength that will outlast a thousand years. It is like that of the stream that runs, of the wind that blows, of the sun that comes up, ruddy as with youth, from the bright east on an early summer's morning. It is the strength of nature living in its own joyful life, and mingling with the life of all around in gladdening companionship. For a hundred beautiful pictures of genuine English existence and English character; for a world of persons and things that have snatched us from the present to their society; for a host of wise and experiencefraught maxims; for many a tear shed, and emotion revived; for many a happy hour and bright remembrance, we thank thee, Dan Chaucer, and just thanks shalt thou receive a thousand years hence."

A greater in the world's esteem, though scarce an equal, follows: EDMUND SPENSER, born also in London, and, like his predecessor, for many years a courtier and a dependent on the great. He took his master's degree at Cambridge in 1576; thence removing to the north, he wrote his Shepherd's Calendar, which he dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, by whom, and the great earl of Leicester, he was introduced to the queen of England. Elizabeth received him graciously; and it is said, though from her known parsimony the fact is questionable, she made him a gratuity of a very large sum in those days-one hundred pounds. In 1579 he was employed on a mission to France, and in the next year was made private secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland. His life, however, was far from happy, and he found, to his sorrow, that to have friends at court implies having enemies also. It was enough for the prosaic Burleigh that Spenser was a "rhymer," as he called him, and the protégé of his rivals, Leicester and Sidney "All this," said the sturdy treasurer, when he received the queen's command to pay the poet a hundred pounds, "all this for a song!" To the bitter and unceasing enmity of Burleigh, and the vexations consequent thereon, the poet evidently alludes in the following expressive lines in his "Mother Hubbard's Tale :”—

"Full little knowest thou that hast not try'd,
What hell it is in suing long to byde;

To lose good days that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want his peers';
To have the asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy bread with comfortless despairs;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

A part of the forfeited estate of the traitor Desmond, containing some three thousand acres of land, in the county of Cork, was granted him through the influence and interest of his friends. Here, in 1590, he wrote the first parts of his master-piece, "The Fairie Queene." Six years after he published the remaining cantos. At Kilcolman-so was his estate called-he passed several of his happiest years. In the society of an affectionate wife, whom he celebrates in immortal verse, with his children growing up about him, and in the midst of scenery the most magnificent, he poured forth streams of melody, cheering and perennial. But all this happiness, and the labors and the life of the poet, came to a speedy and a mournful termination. In the memorable rebellion of Tyrone, an infuriated mob, with savage yells, burst open his dwelling at midnight, set it on fire, destroyed his property, his books, and several unpublished poems; and, keenest pang of all, his youngest child, in his cradle, perished in the flames. Distracted, he fled to London. In poverty, heart-broken, he died there in 1598. His friend, the earl of Essex, was at the expense of his funeral, "which was attended," says Camden, "by poets, and mournful elegies, and Doems, with the pens that wrote them, thrown into his tomb."

"Ah! what a warning for a thoughtless man,

Could field or grove, or any spot of earth,
Show to his eye an image of the pangs
Which it hath witness'd; render back the echo
Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod!"

Thus touchingly moralizeth Wordsworth, in sad contrast with the poet's own description of what Kilcolman was in the bright sunshine of his prosperity :

"Beside the same a dainty place there lay,

Planted with myrtle-trees and laurels green,
In which the birds sung many a lively lay

Of God's high praise, and of their sweet loves' teene,
As it an earthly paradise had been."

In no mood for penning a panegyric, or for the needless task of dwelling upon the beauties of his verse, let us simply say that, as a poet, he accomplished his great mission :-" to breathe lofty and unselfish thoughts into the souls of men; to make truth, purity, and high principle, the objects of desire."

Of SHAKSPEARE, the great and peerless, whose statue, "in the Walhalla of British poetry, must be first admitted and placed in the centre, before gradations and classifications are thought of," our author has gleaned but little that is new. His homes and haunts in London have disappeared before the march of improvement. The theatres, at the doors of which, on his first appearance in London, he held horses, and where afterward he enacted his own inimitable characters; the house at Bankside where he resided when in London; Paris Garden, where the queen, her nobles, and ladies, were wont to amuse themselves at bear-baits, while Willy looked on and studied human nature; the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, where, on club nights, he met the choice spirits of the age-are gone, all gone. "If the fame of men depended on bricks and mortar, what reputations would have been extinguished within the last two centuries in London !" Not so, however, with the quiet village of Stratford upon Avon. The house in which the poet was born is still standing; and “there”we quote our author

-"there stands the house in which he wooed his Ann Hathaway, and the old garden in which he walked with her. There, only a few miles distant, is the stately hall of Charlecote, whither the youthful poacher of Parnassus was carried before the unlucky knight. There stands his tomb, to which the great, and the wise, and the gifted, from all regions of the world, have made pilgrimage, followed by millions who would be thought so, the frivolous and the empty; but all paying homage, by the force of reason, or the force of fashion, vanity, and imitation, to the universal interpreter of humanity. It is well that the slow change of a country town has permitted the spirit of veneration to alight there, and cast its protecting wings over the earthly traces of that existence which diffused itself as a second life through all the realms of intellect. There is nothing missing of Shakspeare's there but the house which he built, and the mulberry-tree which he planted. The tree was hewn down; the house was pulled down and dispersed piecemeal by the infamous parson Gastrell, who thus 'damned himself to eternal fame' more thoroughly than the fool who fired the temple of Diana."

In his habits Shakspeare was abstemious and moral. A lover of home, and devotedly attached to his domestic hearth, he annu