Thames had always been looked to as the great nursery of the navy. Every sunmer during her wars, some two thousand of the watermen were employed in her shups; and in her service Taylor himself made not less than sixteen voyages, including the expeditions under Essex at Cadiz and the Azores. He might therefore have announced himself in his titlepage as an old seaman, had that denomination sounded in those days more respectably than his own.

No other occupation could have furnished him with more opportunities of leisure for reading; and, idle as he had been at school, he soon became a very diligent reader.

"There are many in these days," says Mr. S.," who set up, not alone for simple authors in prose or rhyme, but as critics by profession, upon a much smaller stock of book-knowledge than Taylor the WaterPoet had laid in.

"I care to get good books, and I take heed
And care what I do either write or read
Godfrey of Bulloyne, well by Fairfax done;
Du Bartas, that much love hath rightly won;
Old Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Nash-
1 dipt my finger where they used to wash
Of histories I have perused some store,
As no man of my function hath done more.
The Golden Legend I did overtoss,

And found the gold mixt with a deal of dross.
I have read Plutarch's Morals and his Lives,
And like a bee suckt honey from those hives.
Josephus of the Jews, Knowles of the Turks,
Marcus Aurelius, and Guevara's works;
Lloyd, Grimstone, Montaigne, and Suetonius,
Agrippa, whom some call Cornelius,
Grave Seneca and Cambden, Purchas, Speed,
Old monumental Fox and Hollinshed;
And that sole Book of Books which God hath given,
The blest eternal Testaments of Heaven,
That I have read, and I with care confess
Myself unworthy of such happiness."

But Taylor had had other helps besides reading. The old "license of wit" on the Thames, which lasted even as late as Dr. Johnson's time, was then in its most palmy state, and afforded an excellent school for the sort of ability which he possessed. His calling on the river brought him into constant intercourse with persons of all descriptions. He could hardly pursue it without being a habitual visiter of the theatres on the bank-side. The business of the waterman had much fallen off before Taylor became known for his verses. The peaceful policy of James had put an end to the annual drain for the sea service and, as misfortunes seldom come single, several of the players' companies had removed to the Middlesex side of the river-so that there were more hands than before, and less work to be divided among them. Taylor therefore hoped, that, by occasional broadsides and

pamphlets, he might eke out his means of subsistence; and, in effect, this subsidiary trade of his appears to have been crowned with very considerable success.

"The manner in which he published his books, which were separately of little bulk, was to print them at his own cost, make presents of them, and then hope for "sweet remuneration" from the persons whom he had thus delighted to honour. This mode of publication was not regarded in those days so close akin to mendicity as it would now be deemed; pecuniary gifts of trifling amount being then given and accepted, where it would now be deemed an insult to offer, and a disgrace to receive them. The Earl of Holdernesse was one of his good patrons, and moved King James to bestow a place upon him. What this place was does not appear in his writings, nor have his biographers stated; one office, which must have been much to his liking, he held at the Tower by appointment of Sir William Wade; it was that of receiving for the lieutenant his perquisite of "two black leathern bottles or bombards of wine," (beings in quantity six gallons), from every ship that brought wine into the river Thames, a custom which had continued at that time more than three hundred years. This was a prosperous part of Taylor's life, and if he did not write like Homer in those days, it was not for any failure in drinking, like Agamemnon.

"But the spirit of reform was abroad: the merchants complained that the bottles were made bigger than they used to be, and "waged law" with the lieutenant; and had it not been for the Wine-Poet's exertions, in finding and bringing into court those witnesses, who could swear to the size of the bottles for fifty years, they would have carried their cause. Poor Taylor was ill-rewarded for his services; no sooner had he established the right, than the office which he had held was put to sale, and he was discharged because he would not buy it. "I would not," he says, " or durst not, venture upon so unhonest a novelty, it being sold indeed at so high a rate, that whoso bought it must pay thrice the value of it.”

John Taylor's productions are of the most heterogeneous sort-of all lengths and on all subjects: epitaph-epithalamiumsong-ballad-serious, comic, serio-comic, didactic, narrative, descriptive, and downright rampant nonsense, of which last we have one specimen, in the Cambyses' vein truly:

"Think'st thou a wolf thrust through a sheepskinglove

Can make me take this goblin for a lamb?
Or that a erocodile in barley-broth

When the civil war broke out, the loyal water-poet retired to Oxford, where he supported himself by keeping an eatinghouse, employed his pen valiantly against the Roundheads, and made himself, it is said, "much esteemed for his facetions company." Some humble humorist may commonly be found hanging on the skirts of an English university, half butt, half pet to the "young bloods;" but neither Oxford nor Cambridge records such another non-graduate of this class as Taylor. When the royal cause was ruined, he returned to Westminster, and kept a public house in Phoenix Alley, near Long Acre. Here, after the king's death, he set up a mourning crown for his sign; but this he soon found necessary to take down, and hung his own effigies in its stead. His old age was healthful and merry; he died in 1654, in his seventy-fourth year, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's Covent Garden.

"There is a portrait of him (says Mr. S.) bearing date 1655, by his nephew, who was a painter at Oxford, and presented it to the Bodleian, where it was thought not unworthy of a place. He is represented in a black scull-cap, and black gown, or rather cloak. The countenance is described to me as one of well-fed rotundity: the portrait now is, like the building in which it has thus long been preserved, in a state of rapid decay :-I hope," says the friend to whom I am obliged for this account of it, "bis verse is of a more durable quality:-for ut pic'ura poesis would annihilate him altogether."

Stephen Duck (now hardly remembered but by Swift's malicious epigram) attracted by his verses, while a poor hardworking farm-servant, the notice of a young Oxonian, by name Stanley, who gave him such encouragement, and such advice, that he at last deserved and obtained the patronage of Queen Caroline. Her Majesty settled 301. a-year on him (which was then no poor provision), made him a yeoman of the guard, and soon afterwards keeper of her private library at Richmond, where he had apartments given him, and was encouraged to pursue his studies with a view to holy orders. His poems being published by subscription,

4

happy: the sensibilities which originally
drew him from obscurity, and for which,
when his mind had been opened by in
struction, he discovered himself to be
gifted with no such powers of expression
as could hold out the prospect of lasting
distinction in literature, seem to have
turned inwards with fatal violence. Placed
in a situation of external comfort and
respectability far beyond the warmest
dreams of his youth-surrounded with
honourable duties, which he discharged
not only blamelessly, but with general
applause- the one darling hope, on which
his boyish heart had fastened in ambition,
had withered, exactly as his reading and
intercourse with the upper world had ex-
tended-he_went mad, and drowned him-
self near Reading, in 1756. The best
of his verses are among the earliest of
them; and no one can read some of the
descriptions of rural life, so unlike the
effusions of the pastoral-mongers, which
they contain, without admitting that his
original patrons had some reason to expect
from his maturer pen "things that the
world would not willingly let die." A
small specimen must suffice here:--
"The birds salute us as to work we go,
And with new life our bosoms seem to glow.
On our right shoulder hangs the crooked blade,
The weapon destined to uncloath the mead:
Our left supports the whetstone, scrip, and beer,
This for our scythes, and these ourselves to cheer.
With heat and labour tir'd, our scythes we quit,
Search out a shady tree, and down we sit;
From scrip and bottle hope new strength to gain;
But scrip and bottle too are tried in vain.
Down our parch'd throats we scarce the bread can
get,

And, quite o'erspent with toil, but faintly eat;
Nor can the bottle only answer all;

The bottle and the beer are both too small.
Time flows: again we rise from off the grass;
Again each mower takes his proper place;
We often whet, and often view the sun;
As often wish his tedious race was wou.
At length he veils his purple face from sight,
And bids the weary labourer good night.
Homewards we move, but spent so much with toil,
We slowly walk and rest at every stile.
Our good expecting wives, who think we stay.
Got to the door, soon eye us in the way.
Then from the pot the dumpling's catch'd in haste,
And homely by its side the bacon placed;
Supper and sleep by morn new strength supply,
And out we set again, our work to try."

"At one time," says Mr. Southey, “be

was in such reputatlon, that Lord Palmerston appropriated the rent of an acre of land, for ever, to provide a dinner and strong beer for the threshers of Charlton at a public-house in that valley, in honour of their former comrade. The dinner is given on the 30th of June. The poet himself was present at one of these anniversaries, probably the first. Mr. Southey proceeds to the cobler of Rowley, James Woodhouse, who had the good fortune to have the benevolent Shenstone for his ueighbour, and therefore wanted neither advice nor assistance, so soon as his turn for ballad-inditing had made him known beyond his stall. This too was a good, honest, sober, humble-minded man; and, being judiciously patronised in his own calling, so as to improve his condition, but not subjected to the hazardous experiment of a forcible elevation out of his natural sphere and method of life, his days were passed and ended in more comfort than has fallen to the lot of most of the masters in the art. The sedentary occupation which he followed leaves abundant opportunity for meditation; and if, as has been alleged, more than their just proportion of the murders recorded in our Newgate Calendars belongs to this brooding fraternity, it may serve to balance the account, that it has also produced more rhymers than any of the handicrafts.

"Shenstone found that the poor applicant (Woodhouse) used to work with a pen and ink at his side, while the last was in his lap ;-the head at one employ, the hands at another; and when he had composed a couplet or a stanza, he wrote it on his knee. In one of the pieces thus composed, and entitled Spring, there are these affecting stanzas :-

"But now domestic cares employ
And busy every sense,

Nor leave one hour of grief or joy
But's furnish'd out from thence:

Save what my little babes afford,
Whom I behold with glee,
When smiling at my humble board,
Or prattling at my knee.

Not that my Daphine's charms are flown,
These still new pleasures bring,
'Tis these inspire content alone;
'Tis all I've left of spring.

I wish not, dear connubial state,
To break thy silken bands;
I only blame relentless fate,
That every hour demands.

Nor mourn I much my task austere,
Which endless wants impose;
But oh! it wounds my soul to hear
My Daphne's melting woes!

For oft she sighs and oft she weeps,
And hangs her pensive head,
While blood her furrowed finger steeps,
And stains the passing thread.

When orient hills the sun behold,

Our labours are begun :

And when he streaks the west with gold, The task is still undone."

The once familiar name of Anne Yearsley, the milk woman of Bristol, follows; and Mr. Southey, being himself by birth a Bristol man, tells her story with lively interest and mournful effect. She was first heard of in 1784, when some verses were shown to Miss Haunah Moore as the production of a poor illiterate female who gained her living by selling milk from door to door.

"The story," says Miss More, "did not engage my faith, but the verses excited my attention; for, though incorrect, they breathed the genuine spirit of poetry, and were rendered still more interesting by a certain natural and strong expression of misery, which seemed to fill the head and mind of the author. On making diligent inquiry into her history and character, I found that she had been born and bred in her present humble station, and had never received the least education, except that her brother had taught her to write. Her mother, who was also a milkwoman, appears to have had sense and piety, and to have given an early tincture of religion to this poor woman's mind. She is about eight-and-twenty, and was married very young to a man who is said to be honest and sober, but of a turn of mind very different from her own. Repeated losses and a numerous family, for they had six children in seven years, reduced them very low; and the rigour of the last severe, winter sunk them to the extremity of dis tress. Her aged mother, her six little infants, and herself, (expecting every hour to lie in) were actually on the point of perishing, when the gentleman (Mr. Vaughan), so gratefully mentioned in her poems, providentially heard of their distress, which, I am afraid, she had too carefully concealed, and hastened to their relief. The poor woman and her children were preserved; but for the unhappy mother all assistance came too late; she had the joy to see it arrive, but it was a joy she was no longer able to bear, and it was more fatal to her than famine had been." This "left a settled impression of sorrow on Mrs. Yearsley's mind."

"When I went to see hier," Miss More continues, "I observed a perfect simplicity in her manners, without the least affectation or pretension of any kind; she neither attempted to raise my compassion by her distress, nor my admiration by her parts. But on a more familiar acquaintance, I have had reason to be surprised at the justness of her taste, the faculty I least expected to find in her. In truth, her re

marks on the books she had read are so accurate, and so consonant to the opinions of the best critics, that from this very circumstance they would appear trite and common-place to any one who had been in habits of society; for without having ever conversed with any body above her own level, she seems to possess the general principles of sound taste and just thinking." Under this good lady's patronage Ann Yearsley now read, and studied, and composed; and presently a small volume of poems was published with such success that the sum of three hundred and fifty pounds was placed in the funds under the names of Miss More and Mrs. Montague, as trustees, for the benefit of the authoress and her children. Mrs. Yearsley fancied that she ought to have had the management of the money herself,-disputes arose,—and the result was a lasting breach between her and the person who had been her first, and would have continued to be her best, friend. She set up a circulating library, which she did not know how to manage; her affairs became sorely embarrassed; she tried a tragedy, and a novel, things obviously beyond her reach, -snd, it is said, sunk from despondency into insanity sometime before she died, in 1806, at Melksham. Her disposition had, from the beginning, been a melancholy

one.

"The culture which she received, such as it was, came too late; nor does she appear to have derived any other advantage from it than that it enabled her to write with common grammatical accuracy. With extraordinary talents, strong feelings, and an ardent mind, she never produced a poem which found its way into any popular collection; and very few passages can be extracted from her writings which would have any other value than as indicating powers which the possessor knew not how to employ. But it ought to be observed here, that I have never seen either her novel or her tragedy. The best lines which I have noticed are in her second publication.

"Cruel the hand Which tears the veil of time from black dishonour; Or. with the iron pen of Justice, cuts Her cypher on the scars of early shame."

There is a like felicity of expression in these lines on the remembrance of her mother:

"Flourishing reputations (of the gourd tribe) have been made by writers of much less feeling and less capability than are evident in these lines. Ann Yearsley, though gifted with voice, had no strain of her own whereby to be remembered, but she was no mocking-bird."

"I do not introduce Robert Bloomfield here, because his poems are worthy of preservation separately, and in general collections; and because it is my intention one day to manifest at more length my respect for one whose talents were of no common standard, and whose character was in all respects exemplary. It is little to the credit of the age, that the latter days of a man whose name was at one time so deservedly popnlar, should have been passed in poverty, and perhaps shortened by distress, that distress having been brought on by no misconduct or imprudence of his own.'

The proud name of Robert Burns does not occur in this Essay; Mr. Southey estimates him too justly to class him, on any pretext, with uneducated poets. That extraordinary man, before he had produced any of the pieces on which his fame is built, had educated himself abundantly; and when he died, at the age of thirtyseven, knew more of books, as well as of men, than fifty out of a hundred in any of the learned professions in any country of the world are ever likely to do. We might speak in nearly the same way of Burns' two popular successors in Scottish minstrelsy. When the Ettrick Shepherd was first heard of, he had indeed but just learned to write by copying the letters of a printed ballad, as he lay watching his flock on the mountains; but thirty years or more have passed since then, and his acquirements are now such, that the Royal Society of Literature, in patronizing him, might be justly said to honour a laborious and successful student, as well as a masculine and fertile genius. Mr. Allan Cunningham needs no testimony either to his intellec tual accomplishments or his moral worth; nor, thanks to his own virtuous diligence, does he need any patronage. He has been fortunate enough to secure a respectable establishment in the studio of a great artist, who is not less good than great, and would thus be sufficiently in the eye of the world, even were his literary talents less industriously exercised than they have hitherto been. His recent lives of the British

howl'd

Around our heads, and I contented sit,
Drinking the wiser accents of thy tongue,
Listless of threatening ill My tender eye
Was fix'd on thine, inquisitively sad,
Whilst thine was dim with sorrow. Yet thy soul
Betray'd no innate weakness, but resolv'd
To tread thy sojourn calm and undismay'd."

most agreeable books in the language; and it will always remain one of the most remarkable and delightful facts in the history of letters, that such a work-one conveying so much valuable knowledge in a style so unaffectedly attractive-so im

bued throughout, not only with lively sensibility, amiable feelings, honesty and candour, but mature and liberal taste, was produced by a man who, some twenty years before, earned his daily bread as a common stone-mason in the wilds of Nithsdale. Examples like these will plead the cause of struggling genius, wherever it may be found, more powerfully than all the arguments in the world.

The authors of "The Retrospect," "Miscellaneous Pieces in Verse," and "The Mechanics' Saturday Night," respectively published in 1830, are indivduals whose fortune it has been to be placed in situations of life, which afforded neither the means nor the opportunities of cultivating their minds. We shall present along with a specimen of their talents, the letters of the two former, where they nrge their claims to be treated with indulgence. The first is from John Wright, author of the "Retrospect."

"Glasgow, October 1830.

"SIR,-I have taken the freedom of sending you a copy of the Retrospect, a poem of mine, newly published, to which I trust you will give a timely perusal; at the same time making much allowance for a young man, in the largest sense of the word-illiterate, who was never under the tuition of any one except for six months, at a very early age, though I am fully sensible that no circumstances whatever can apologize for insipid poetry. If you judge it worthy of being noticed in your periodical you will oblige

Yours,

Surveys, through air, cleft clouds, and yielding sky;

As mariner tossed on ocean, surging high,
His bark o'erset, hails land, afar unfurled;
Thus greet we these fair forms, and still descry
Enchantment there-live emblem of the world!
Poesy and passion, thus, all subsultory whirled.

"Though fetter'd to the spot, we first begin
To live and die, unseen the world by sight,
The beauty and sublimity therein;
And though our hearts ne'er heaved on Alpine
height,

Nor sailed on iceberg through the Polar night, Oh! deem not thou, aloft where fortune shues, Our day-spring darkness, our enjoyments slightIn lovelier, loftier dome the bard reclines, These dread stupendous forms his Alps and Appennines."

Mr. Mauley, author of "Miscellaneous Poems," writes as follows:

"SIR, I take the liberty of soliciting your opinion of the inclosed book. It may be necessary to inform you, its contents are the youthful productions of one moving almost in one of the humblest situations in life, whose scholastic advantages have not exceeded a country charity school education, and who, thus far through life, has had to struggle with poverty, and latterly with a lingering illness. It may be deemed a boldness in a poor and perfect stranger to make such a request; but, after a perusal, should you deem it worthy a review, your opinion of it will, perhaps contribute to the welfare of your very humble servant, R. MANLEY. "Southmolton, Devon, September 4, 1830."

Mr. Manly has many pieces of a tender and affecting nature, which is the general character of his lyrics. We quote his lines on death.

"How chilly thy bed, and how dreary thy regions! What darkness surrounds thee! how boundless thy reign!

How rueful thy wastes! and, what numberless legions

Go, shivering, down to thy gloomy domain !

"The sage and the hero thou takest, nor sparest
The wife of the bosom, the child of the heart;
And often, alas! are the friends we love dearest,
The first who submit to thy terrible dart.

"How our nature starts back from that moment of anguish,

And hope is the last that submits to the blow; Even those who in sorrow and poverty languish, Are afraid of thy coming, and deem the their foe.

"The Christian, alone, redeem'd from life's errors, Can meet thee with courage, and cheerfully sing, O grave, thou art vanquish'd, and where are thy terrors?

O death, thou art conquer'd, and where is thy sting?"

In the Mechanic's "Saturday Night," the author gives a graphic description of a Saturday night; such alas! as it is too often found to realize. It opens with a