the latter remarked, "Don't disparage it; nobody could have made it but himself."

Fox, however, did not lay undue stress on eloquence, and in a well-known speech declared that one sometimes paid too dearly for oratory.

I remember [he said] a time when the whole of the Privy Council came away, throwing up their caps, and exulting in an extraordinary manner at a speech made by the present Lord Rosslyn (Alexander Wedderburn), and an examination of Dr. Franklin (before the Privy Council on the letters of Hutchinson and Oliver, the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts), in which that respectable man was most uncommonly badgered. But we paid very dear for that splendid specimen of eloquence, and all its attendant tropes, figures, metaphors, and hyperbole; for then came the Bill, and in the end we lost all our American colonies, a hundred millions of money, and a hundred thousand of our brave fellow subjects.

Fox made mistakes occasionally, as when he asserted the right of the Prince of Wales to the Regency; but he was distinguished in the House of Commons for his "hopeful sympathy with all good and great causes." In a day when politicians were not especially enlightened, he was a supporter of Parliamentary reform, a champion of Catholic Emancipation, and an opponent of the slave trade; and, indeed, it was by his advocacy of these measures that he earned the enmity of the King, and thus was prevented from carrying out these beneficial schemes.

It has already been admitted that he was a spendthrift, and had a passion for gaming which, when taxed with it by Lord Hillsborough in the House of Commons, he designated as “a vice countenanced by the fashion of the times, a vice to which some of the greatest characters had given way in the early part of their lives, and a vice which carried with it its own punishment." His weaknesses, however, were far more than overbalanced by his many splendid qualities. He was a noble antagonist, and when Pitt made his first speech, and some one remarked he would be one of the first men in Parliament, "He is so already," said Fox. Which recalls the story of the Prince of Wales' remarks on hearing of the death of the

Duchess of Devonshire: "Then we have lost the best-bred woman in England." "Then," said the more generous Fox, we have lost the kindest heart in England."

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Fox was a great-hearted man, with a beautiful disposition, high spirits, unbounded good-humour, delightful conversation, a great affection for his friends, an undeniable loyalty to those who trusted him; and these qualities, combined with his great natural abilities and an indisputable charm, made him a great, commanding and fascinating figure. Gibbon, a political opponent, said he possessed "the powers of a superior man, as they are blended in his attractive character, with the softness and simplicity of a child," adding that "perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity or falsehood"; but the greatest tribute came from Burke, who described him simply and, perhaps, sufficiently as "a man made to be loved."

LEWIS MELVILLE.

THE POETRY OF NORA

THE

CHESSON

HE untimely death of the writer of these poems-an event still fresh in the memory of her many readersgives them a new and pathetic interest. Her music breathes so much passion and energy, so much of the sheer joy of living, that one can hardly yet realise its sudden lapse into the last silence. And lovers of poetry feel their loss the greater because it was a woman's voice that sang to them, and that sings no more. Most women live in silent places even on this side of the undiscovered country; their whole life is "a spring shut up, a fountain sealed" save to the few who know them best. A woman who speaks for her sex, then, has a revelation of great price to divulge; the secrets of a sea unfathomed and a height unscaled. The romance which invests the explorer clings to the woman-poet who puts herself into her song: she shows us a new world in the midst of our own.

Such a poet, beyond all doubt, was the young Irishwoman in whom Ireland has lost so much. She wrote much in many different styles; she was a critic, a novelist, and an authority on her country's rich variety of folk-lore; she could produce or review a poem with equal ease. But she was before all things a woman-a whole-hearted member of the race which, whenever it is vocal, is sure to "find in Love the heart's blood of its song." She saw the pageant of the world through feminine eyes, as Elizabeth Browning and Christina Rossetti

did before her; and what she saw she sang. Thus her music, like theirs, has an individual note and a special value; it speaks in natural tones the language of a woman's heart. Nor is this true of the personal poems alone; the charm of her womanhood is in all her work alike, clinging to it as inseparably, even when as impalpably, as the rose-scent to the rose. The vision of sunset on a stormy sea cannot hold her eyes; they see instead the city ways that know her lover's feet. Is not the verse which tells us this the more charming because it mixes Nature's voice with love's?

Over the western waters the clouds are edged with flame,

Eastward hovers the darkness whence last the lightning came;

There's a strange voice in the evening air, a strange breath from the sea, And far away in London my lover dreams of me.

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So it is in other poems-"Love in September," " On Rye Hill," and "Glamour"—all repeat the same story of exterior beauty changed and softened by a warmth from within. The sweets of the autumnal garden, where "one great star and only

" looks down on the year's last flowers; the ascent of the wooded hill, with the sight of the sea from its crest; and the mystic "glamour" of a world enchanted into unreality by the spell of moonrise each of these things becomes in turn the mirror of the soul that sees them by its own living light. Hence we find in these poems none of that "merciless description of Nature" which Stopford Brooke condemns as a vice of contemporary poetry. The cry of the heart comes to us with the song of the wind; a tree is not presented to us as" mere firewood," but as a beneficent shadow under which lovers may tryst and happy children play. Even in the vividlyrealised "Thunderstorm " (a Nature picture, pure and simple, informed in every line with the eye that sees and the heart that feels it) the landscape is humanised by the woman's tender vision of a weeping child. The poem begins and ends on this note, like music which reverts to its opening theme in its concluding phrase:

The wind cries like a child to-night;
Its breath has turned the poplars white,
The ivy shudders on the wall,

And petals of red roses fall.

A moment, and the world is dumb,

The moment ere the thunders come;

The earth holds breath 'twixt fear and pain,

Then, child-like, floods her fear with rain.

Love of Ireland and the Irish often blends with love of Nature in the poetry of Nora Chesson; the "Irish ivy" of one of her most characteristic utterances grew in her heart as in its native soil. Her muse was born "Under Quicken Boughs," and sang in their shadow to the end; her work harked back always to its origin among the shamrocks. The mystery and witchery of Ireland beat in her blood; and few of the sweet singers "whom from her wilds Ierne sent" have more passionately desired her peace. She looked out on the dark places of that unhappy land through eyes wet with its accumulated tears, as one belated in the night, but hoping against hope for the dawn. The "Ballads in Prose" (and their companions in verse no less) smell of the very soil of Ireland; the peat fire burns in them with a glow no English hand has force to kindle. And by its light we see the poetry of Celtic thought and the long romance of Celtic history; we are kindled by Erse legends and overshadowed by Erse superstitions; we mourn with the peasant lover over his dead "colleen," or watch, with mingled fear and fascination, the slow drooping of the girl on whom the pixies have cast their fatal spell. The very music of "The Parting of the Ways" is made up of the brogue it echoes:

Come back and say where you dwell to-day, my colleen oge and my
colleen bawn;

If I must go where the light burns low, and never a night is friends
with dawn?

Or upwards climb to the steeps sublime, where even the hills
near by are blue?

Which way will I take for my storeen's sake? which way, agra, must

I follow you?