they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or reject, to run them into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose. I have so long studied and practised both, that they are grown into a habit, and become familiar to me."
In a letter to Mrs. Stewart, a painter and poetess of great personal attractions, after indulging in some very gallant observations, he gives a less confident account of his powers. He writes: "Madam, old men are not so insensible to beauty as it may be you young ladies think. For your part, I must needs acknowledge that your fair eyes had made me your slave before I received your fair presents. * * I am still dragging on, always a poet, and never a good one. I pass my time with Ovid, and sometimes with our old poet Chaucer, translating such stories as best please my fancy; and intend besides them to add some of my own, so that it is not impossible, but ere the summer be passed, I may come down to you with a volume in my hand, like a dog out of the water with a duck in his mouth."
All readers of his life will rejoice to find that if formerly what Mr. Hallam calls Dryden's "coarseness of mind" had induced him to make even Juvenal more gross, in the latest years of his life he repented of this, and endeavoured to make some amends for the fault. In his preface to the "Fables," after discussing the merits of Ovid, Bocaccio, Chaucer, and others, he makes an especial boast of having avoided Dan Chaucer's improprieties, and adds: "But I will no more offend against good manners. I am sensible, as I ought to be, of the scandal I have given by my loose writings; and make what reparation I am able, by this public acknowledgment."
It was at this period that he produced "Alexander's Feast," justly called by Mr. Macaulay the noblest ode in the language. We are sorry to find Mr. Hallam speaking
