Jane, a few moments before her execution, takes her last farewell of her weeping mother. What shall I give thee?—they have left me little— I cannot part with it; upon this finger To wipe the death-damp from his brow. This kiss- For the dying for the dead! Farewell! farewell! Sir Aubrey de Vere in this play-and it is no slight dramatic achievement-enlists our sympathies for Jane Grey, yet gives us to feel that with Mary we visit higher heights and lower depths of tragedy. Both in MARY TUDOR and Mr. Aubrey de Vere's ALEXANDER THE GREAT the weight of a great subject is fully sustained, the action is spaciously planned, the verse moves with stately grace. But our age has set its face against the drama, and it may perhaps be counted fortunate that in a literary form so popular as the sonnet the De Veres have graven for themselves a lasting memorial. There are sonnets by father and by son that anthologies centuries hence will reproduce. Sonnets like Sir Aubrey's entitled 'The Shannon,' or 'Spanish Point,' or 'The Rock of Cashel,' or Mr. De Vere's 'Sorrow' or 'The Sun God,' must remain among our permanent poetical treasures. W. MACNEILE DIXON. Sir Aubrey de Vere, Bart., born 1788, was the eldest son of Sir Vere Hunt, of Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland. His father afterwards took the name of De Vere as a descendant of De Vere, fifteenth Earl of Oxford. He published JULIAN THE APOSTATE, a drama, 1822; THE DUKE OF MERCIA, an historical drama, and THE LAMENTATIONS OF IRELAND, 1823; THE SONG OF FAITH, DEVOUT EXERCISES AND SONNETS, 1842. MARY TUDOR, an historical drama (written 1844), was published after the author's death, and without his final revision, in 1847. He died in 1846. GOUGANE BARRA NOT beauty which men gaze on with a smile, LIBERTY OF THE PRESS SOME laws there are too sacred for the hand When Freedom was the nurse of public good, On such we found our rights, to such we cling; Make man a reptile, he will turn and sting THE ROCK OF CASHEL ROYAL and saintly Cashel! I would gaze When the sun's parting glance, through slanting showers, Sheds o'er thy rock-throned battlements and towers Such awful gleams as brighten o'er Decay's Prophetic cheek. At such a time methinks There breathes from thy lone courts and voiceless aisles A melancholy moral; such as sinks On the lone traveller's heart amid the piles THE SHANNON RIVER of billows, to whose mighty heart From their lone mountain-cradles, wild and free, Nursed with the fawns, lulled by the woodlark's glee, And cushat's hymeneal song apart; River of chieftains, whose baronial halls, Like veteran warders, watch each wave-worn steep, Portumna's towers, Bunratty's royal walls, Carrick's stern rock, the Geraldine's grey keep River of dark mementoes! must I close My lips with Limerick's wrong, with Aughrim's woes? SPANISH POINT THE waters-O the waters !-wild and glooming, Onward, like death, they come, the rocks entombing! O'er the disastrous deep; nor seaman's cry! Mementoes haunt those reefs; how that proud Host By God's decree, along this fatal coast, And over all their purple and their gold, Mitre and helm and harp, the avenging waters rolled ! JOHN KELLS INGRAM DR. INGRAM was born in 1823, in the County Donegal, and educated at Newry School, and in Trinity College, Dublin. He became a Fellow of Trinity in 1846, and is an Honorary LL.D. of Glasgow University. He has held in Trinity College the offices of Professor of Greek, Professor of English Literature, Senior Lecturer and Vice-Provost, and he has been President of the Royal Irish Academy and a Commissioner for the Publication of the Ancient Laws and Institutions of Ireland. Owing to advancing age he laid down all these offices in 1899, but left behind him an enduring record of work well done for the interests of Irish intellect and scholarship. His principal published works relate to political economy ('Work and the Workman '—an address to the Trades Union Congress in 1880-and the articles on 'Political Economy' and 'Slavery' in the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, ninth edition). The famous lyric, written in Dr. Ingram's student days, 'The Memory of the Dead' (see Book III., 'Poets of The Nation') was for the first time formally acknowledged when Dr. Ingram published a volume of poems in 1900; but its authorship has long been an open secret. The quatrain, printed in the following selection, 'Each nation master at its own fireside,' may perhaps be taken as representing his later LL views on the Irish National Question. Carlyle in his Irish tour of 1849 notes that Ingram's opinions had already undergone a change. The best of Dr. Ingram's sonnets, in his volume SONNETS AND OTHER POEMS, belong to a sequence, and cannot, as a rule, be taken out of their context without loss. Noble in thought and expression, they seem to carry with them the air of great literature, and they make us regret that their author has given us so little verse, and that little so late. SONNET On reading the Sonnet by R. C. D., entitled ' In Memoriam G. P. C.,' in Macmillan's Magazine.' In Macmillan's Magazine for April 1881 there appeared a sonnet by Archbishop Trench on the death of Sir George Pomeroy Colley on Majuba Hill. The following sonnet, signed 'J. K. I.,' appeared in The Academy of April 2: YES! mourn the soul, of high and pure intent, The tuneful note that wails the dead we hear; To shame such foul oppression, and proclaim SOCIAL HEREDITY MAN is no mushroom growth of yesterday. Govern us, whether gladly we obey |