dation than any that I can give; it is Mrs. Browning's favourite among the poems of Longfellow : THE ARROW AND THE SONG. I shot an arrow into the air, 1 breathed a song into the air, Long, long afterwards, in an oak I venture to add an anecdote new to the English public. Professor Longfellow's residence at Cambridge, a picturesque old wooden house, has belonging to it the proudest historical associations of which America can boast it was the head-quarters of Washington. One night the poet chanced to look out of his window, and saw by the vague starlight a figure riding slowly past the mansion. The face could not be distinguished; but the tall erect person, the cocked hat, the traditional costume, the often-described white horse, all were present. Slowly he paced before the house, and then returned, and then again passed by, after which neither horse nor rider were seen or heard of. Could it really be Washington? or was it some frolic-masquerader assuming his honoured form? For my part I hold firmly to the ghostly side of the story, so did my informant, also a poet and an American, and as worthy to behold the spectre of the illustrious warrior as Professor Longfellow himself. I can hardly say more. VII. AUTHORS SPRUNG FROM THE PEOPLE. THOMAS HOLCROFT. I REMEMBER saying one day to a woman of high genius that a mutual friend of hers and mine proposed to give a series of lectures on authors sprung from the people, from the masses as it is the fashion to say now-a-days, and her replying quickly : Why all authors who are worth reading are sprung from the people;-it is the well-born who are the exceptions." And then she ran through a beadroll of great names from Chaucer to Burns: nevertheless this repartee was not quite right; not a whit more right than a repartee usually is; for the number of educated writers must always preponderate. But still the class of self-educated writers is large, increasingly large; and truthful biographies of such persons must always be amongst the most in teresting books in the world, as showing better than any other books the development and growth of individual minds. Mr. Bamford's "Life of a Radical" and Mr. Somerville's account of his own career have much of this merit; but the most curious of all these memoirs both for the vicissitudes of the story and the indomitable character of the man, is the "Life of Thomas Holcroft," begun by himself and concluded by Hazlitt. Of his strength of character no better evidence can be offered than that the first seventeen chapters were dictated by him during his last illness whilst he was in such a state that he was frequently obliged to pause several minutes between every word, and yet the events are as clearly narrated and the style is as lucid and as lively as if it had been written in his most vigorous day. He was born in London in the winter of 1745; his father being by trade a shoemaker, but of a disposition so unsteady that he never could remain long in any place or at any occupation. Here is the account his son, a most dutiful and affectionate son who maintained him to his death, gives of these rambling propensities : "Having been bred to an employment for which he was very ill-fitted, the habit that became most rooted in and most fatal to my father was a fickleness of disposition, a thorough persuasion after he had tried one means of providing for himself and his family for a certain time, that he had discovered another far more profitable and secure. Steadiness of pursuit was a virtue at which he never could arrive; and I believe few men in the kingdom had in the course of their lives been the hucksters of so many small wares, or more enterprising dealers in articles of a halfpenny value. In "I should mention that to carry on these itinerant trades my father had begun with purchasing an ass, and bought more as he could; now and then increasing his store by the addition of a ragged pony or a worn-out weather-beaten Rozinante. autumn he turned his attention to fruit and conveyed apples and pears in hampers from villages to market towns. The bad nourishment I met with, the cold and wretched manner in which I was clothed, and the excessive weariness I endured in following these animals day after day, and being obliged to drive creatures perhaps still more weary than myself, were miseries much too great, and loaded my little heart with sorrows far too poignant ever to be forgotten. By-roads and high-roads were alike to be traversed, but the former far the oftenest, for they were then almost innumerable and the state of them in winter would hardly be believed at present. 66 My father became by turns a collector and vender of rags, a hardwareman, a dealer in buttons, |