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—
What slight memorial through soft tears to gaze on?
This bridal ring--the symbol of past joy?

I cannot part with it; upon this finger
It must go down into the grave Perchance
After long years some curious hand may find it,
Bright, like our better hopes, amid the dust,
And piously, with a low sigh, replace it.
Here, take this veil, and wear it for my sake.
And take this winding-sheet to him, and this
Small handkerchief, so wetted with my tears,
To wipe the death-damp from his brow. This kiss
And this--my last-print on his lips, and bid hin
Think of me to the last, and wait my spirit.
Farewell, my mother! Farewell, dear, dear mother!
These terrible moments I must pass in prayer-

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,

Not grace that wins, no charm of form or love,
Dwelt with that scene.

Sternly upon my view

And slowly-as the shrouding clouds awhile
Disclosed the beetling crag and lonely isle—
From their dim lake the ghostly mountains grew,
Lit by one slanting ray. An eagle flew
From out the gloomy gulf of the defile,
Like some bad spirit from Hades. To the shore
Dark waters rolled, slow-heaving, with dull moan;
The foam-flakes hanging from each livid stone

Like froth on deathful lips; pale mosses o'er
The shattered cell crept, as an orphan lone
Clasps his cold mother's breast when life is gone.

LIBERTY OF THE PRESS

SOME laws there are too sacred for the hand
Of man to approach: recorded in the blood
Of patriots, before which, as the Rood
Of faith, devotional we take our stand;
Time-hallowed laws! Magnificently planned
When Freedom was the nurse of public good,
And Power paternal laws that have withstood
All storms, unshaken bulwarks of the land!
Free will, frank speech, an undissembling mind,
Without which Freedom dies and laws are vain,

On such we found our rights, to such we cling;
In them shall power his surest safeguard find.
Tread them not down in passion or disdain ;

Make man a reptile, he will turn and sting.

THE ROCK OF CASHEL

ROYAL and saintly Cashel! I would gaze
Upon the wreck of thy departed powers
Not in the dewy light of matin hours,
Nor the meridian pomp of summer's blaze,
But at the close of dim autumnal days,

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
Of vast Persepolis on her mountain stand,
Or Thebes half buried in the desert sand.

THE SHANNON

RIVER of billows, to whose mighty hear
The tide-wave rushes of the Atlantic Sea :
River of quiet depths, by cultured lea,
Romantic wood or city's crowded mart;
River of old poetic founts, which start

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,
Beneath the stormy pall that shrouds the sky,
On, through the deep'ning mist more darkly looming,
Plumed with the pallid foam funereally,

Onward, like death, they come, the rocks entombing!
Nor thunder-knell is needful from on high;
Nor sound of signal gun, momently booming

O'er the disastrous deep; nor seaman's cry!
And yet, if aught were wanting, manifold

Mementoes haunt those reefs; how that proud Host
Of Spain and Rome so smitten were of old,

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

Trinity College, Dublin. 1846, and is an Honorary

educated at Newry School, and in He became an Fellow of Trinity in 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,
Humane as valiant, in disastrous fight
Laid low on far Majuba's bloody height !
Yet not his death alone must we lament,
But more such spirit on evil mission sent
To back our broken faith with arméd might
And the unanswered plea of wounded Right
Strike dumb by warfare's brute arbitrament.
And while these deeds are done in England's name,
Religion, unregardful, keeps her cell :

The tuneful note that wails the dead we hear;
Where are the sacred thunders that should swell

To shame such foul oppression, and proclaim
Eternal justice in the nation's ear?

SOCIAL HEREDITY

MAN is no mushroom growth of yesterday.
His roots strike deep into the hallow'd mould
Of the dead centuries; ordinances old

Govern us, whether gladly we obey