The baffled prince in honour's flattering bloom.
Of hasty greatness finds the fatal doom,

His foes' derision, and his subjects' blame,
And steals to death from anguish and from shame.
Enlarge my life with multitude of days,

In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays;
Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know
That life protracted is protracted woe.
Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy:

In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour,
The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flower;
With listless eyes the dotard views the store,
He views and wonders that they please no more;
Now pall the tasteless meats, and joyless wines,
And luxury with sighs her slave resigns.
Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain,
Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain:

No sounds, alas! would touch th' impervious ear,
Though dancing mountains witnessed Orpheus near;
Nor lute nor lyre his feeble powers attend,
Nor sweeter music of a virtuous friend;
But everlasting dictates crowd his tongue,
Perversely grave, or positively wrong.
The still returning tale and lingering jest
Perplex the fawning niece and pampered guest,
While growing hopes scarce awe the gathering sneer,
And scarce a legacy can bribe to hear:
The watchful guests still hint the last offence,
The daughter's petulance, the son's expense,
Improve his heady rage with treacherous skill,
And mould his passions till they make his will.
Unnumbered maladies his joints invade,
Lay siege to life, and press the dire blockade;
But unextinguished avarice still remains,
And dreaded losses aggravate his pains;

He turns, with anxious heart and crippled hands,
His bonds of debt, and mortgages of lands;
Or views his coffers with suspicious eyes,
Unlocks his gold, and counts it till he dies.

But grant the virtues of a temperate prime
Blest with an age exempt from scorn or crime;
An age that melts with unperceived decay,
And glides in modest innocence away;
Whose peaceful day benevolence endears,
Whose night congratulating conscience cheers;
The general favourite as the general friend :
Such age there is, and who shall wish its end?
Yet even on this her load misfortune flings,
To press the weary minute's flagging wings;
New sorrow rises as the day returns,
A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns;
Now kindred merit fills the sable bier,
Now lacerated friendship claims a tear.
Year chases year, decay pursues decay,
Still drops some joy from withering life away;
New forms arise and different views engage,
Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage,
Till pitying nature signs the last release,
And bids afflicted worth retire to peace.

But few there are whom hours like these await,

Who set unclouded in the gulfs of fate.

From Lydia's monarch should the search descend,
By Solon cautioned to regard his end,

In life's last scene what prodigies surprise,
Fears of the brave and follies of the wise?

From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show.
The teeming mother, anxious for her race,
Begs for each birth the fortune of a face;
Yet Vane could tell what ills from beauty spring;
And Sedley cursed the form that pleased a king.

****

Ye nymphs of rosy lips and radiant eyes,
Whom pleasure keeps too busy to be wise,
Whom joys with soft varieties invite,

By day the frolic, and the dance by night,
Who frown with vanity, who smile with art,
And ask the latest fashion of the heart,

What care, what rules your heedless charms shall save,
Each nymph your rival, and each youth your slave?
Against your fame with fondness hate combines,
The rival batters, and the lover mines.
With distant voice neglected virtue calls,

Less heard, and less, the faint remonstrance falls;
Fired with contempt, she quits the slippery reign,
And pride and prudence take her seat in vain.
In crowd at once, where none the pass defend,
The harmless freedom, and the private friend;
The guardians yield, by force superior plied;
To interest prudence, and to flattery pride.
Her beauty falls betrayed, despised, distressed,
And hissing infamy proclaims the rest.

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
Must dull suspense corrupt the stagnant mind?
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?

Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise,

No cries invoke the mercies of the skies?
Inquirer cease, petitions yet remain,

Which Heaven may hear, nor deem religion vain.
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,

But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice.

Safe in His power, whose eyes discern afar
The secret ambush of a specious prayer.
Implore His aid, in His decisions rest,
Secure whate'er He gives, He gives the best.
Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires,
And strong devotion to the skies aspires,

Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resigned,
For love which scarce collective man can fill,
For patience sovereign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith that, panting for a happier seat,

Counts death kind nature's signal of retreat.
These goods for man the laws of Heaven ordain,
These goods He grants, who grants the power to gain;
With these celestial Wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find.

Anglo-Saxons and Normans.

HARDY.

[AMONGST the most learned of our modern race of antiquaries, was Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, who, in 1819, when he was in his fifteenth year, became a junior clerk in the Record Office in the Tower, and there, working his way with unceasing diligence and rare sagacity, succeeded in 1861 to the important office of Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, vacant by the death of Sir Francis Palgrave. Sir T. Hardy was not less remarkable for his original views of great historical questions, and for his power of expounding his opinions, than for his erudition founded upon his long and varied experience. In the vexed question regarding the character and influence of the Anglo-Saxon or Norman element of our literature, Sir Thomas Hardy regards the Norman Conquest as having introduced a higher tone of thought than belonged to the insularity of our Teutonic forefathers. In the following extract from the preface to the second volume of "Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland," 1865, he presents us with a most interesting view of the differences between the conceptions and acquirements of the two races, who, in a couple of centuries, became amalgamated in feelings and principles, each adopting from the other what war excellent in their several distinctive qualities, whether for building up a Litera ture or a State. Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy died in 1878.]

The Anglo-Saxon was isolated from the Continent; it was the inevitable tendency of that isolation to shut him up in a narrow round of ideas and still narrower sympathies, to make him perfectly satisfied with his present condition, or rather with that state of degeneracy into which he was insensibly sinking deeper and

deeper from age to age. His literature is the exact counterpart of that moral and intellectual condition. To force him out of those habits was the inevitable consequence of the Conquest. To bring him into violent collision with a race of conquerors whose habits of life, whose social condition, whose cosmopolitan tendencies were directly opposed to his own, was the bitter but salutary fruit of his submission to the Norman. The Anglo-Saxon never rose above local attachments; his own soil, his own parish, his own saint were sufficient for him, and he sought no further. His writings were like himself. With the exception of Beda, and perhaps of Alfred, there is no Anglo-Saxon author who exhibits any interest for what was or had been going on in Christendom beyond the narrow range of his own experience. He had no sense of a common brotherhood; no value for things removed from himself and his own immediate observation; even that intense attraction which Rome, as the visible representative of the past, once exercised over his imagination had ceased to stimulate him. The history of the Anglo-Saxon from the time of King Alfred to the Norman Conquest is little else than the history of disorganisation, degeneracy, and decay. On any other theory it would be impossible to explain how a people who had spent more than two centuries in mastering the unwarlike Britons should in less than two years have been so completely overawed by a handful of Normans as never to attempt to rise and rid themselves of their conquerors. The noble and the gentle, swept into one undistinguished serfdom with their slaves, were content, like submissive bondsmen, to till the land they had occupied before as masters, Therefore, that the Anglo-Saxon, already sunk before the Conquest into the lowest stage of feebleness, should never recover his independence after the Conquest will scarcely appear remarkable. He bowed his head without resistance to a stronger and more energetic race. But that a people, so given to song as the Anglo-Saxon, so attached to their native soil, to their here. ditary traditions, to their old masters and customs, should have left no songs behind them to indicate their feelings under the change, that they should have apparently produced not a