Slim knights on chargers sable black,

Plump dames on palfreys milky white, Red burghers reeling ripe with sack,

And courtly damsels sweet and slight; Afar a trumpet bloweth faintly,

The street curves quaintly,

And cumbrous sign-boards creak on left and right.

The tumult of the street is loud,

But down its midst the pilgrims flaunt;

I elbow Chaucer in the crowd,

And trotting by see John of Gaunt.
A shout!-and to the river's shores

I float in dream with heart that fails,
While slowly past, with soundless oars,
A gold-prow'd barge, dight gaily, sails;
And in the crowded stern the stately
Bess sits sedately,

Mid lords in ruffs and dames in farthingales.

The people shout, she bends in pride,
And slowly, queenly glides along;
When swaggering to the water's side

Comes Raleigh with a courtly throng;
The common herd draws back the while,-
They bow, she nods, the people cheer,
While Leicester smiles a crafty smile

And stoops to whisper in her ear;
Sharply she smiles, with eyes cast downward:
When, turning townward,

I see Will Shakspere lounging idly near.

At sight of whom the pageant dies,

And I am swiftly carried far,

Unto a tavern where the wise

Are made by wine oracular;

And Jonson's learned sock is on,

Beyond the wisdom of the schools, And, placed at Selden's side, I con

The golden Apollonian rules:

"He who drinks water but abuses The jocund Muses;

Mirth is to care what sages are to fools !"

Then, while the shadow of the wan

Proud face still haunts the heart's sad gloom,

I see in dream a blind old man

Sit in a quaint and lonely room;

His thoughts are with that martyr'd life,

Its stubborn wrong and fretful spleen,

And with the past degenerate strife

When Charles was mad and Cromwell mean;

But in his age, divine and shriven,

Visions of heaven

Subdue the fretful war his life has been.

Then trumpets blow, fifes play, drums beat,
Gay banners flutter in the sun;

All men and women throng the street,
And joy is with them every one;

And down the centre of the throng,

Who shout and cry with might and main,

A merry monarch rides along,

With easy pace and slackened rein;

Gaily apparel'd, on he prances,

With beaming glances,

While wine-soak'd Frenchmen chatter in his train.

And all is changed!-Mid lords and wits,
As false as wits and lords can be,

In yonder inn the monarch sits,

And giggling Nell is on his knee;
Or, watched by silent squires and grooms,
Mid laugh and jest that find no pause,
He wanders through his stately rooms

With wits he helps to scorn the laws;
While Wilmott, in his madcap passion,
Libels king fashion,

And Dryden, at his elbow, hums and haws..

Again a change!-From London flies

A king, with priestcraft on his lips,
And o'er the sea a proud and wise

Monarch comes sailing slow in ships;
And through the streets of London town
The wiser monarch rides in pride,
To win a beautiful renown

And wave the olive far and wide;
Rich hopes are with him, and his face is
Full of stern graces,

Born of a heart fresh as the salt-sea tide.

And then I see a sickly queen

Among her palace-gardens stand,

A vacant fear is in her mien,

The sceptre trembles in her hand; While 'neath the shade of Temple Bar

Walk shabby wits, who serve the stateSteele, with mad laughter steeped in war, And Addison, with smile sedate, And Swift, the bilious English Rabelais, Plods westward shabbily,

On my Lord Bolingbroke, alone, to wait.

The people pass me to and fro,

Chairman and tradesman, wit and lord;

Here the thin shadow of a beau,

With palsied wig, and slender sword;

And at a shout I step aside,

And carried in her chair, between
Two serving-men, comes happy-eyed
Vanessa, nodding to the Dean;
And Pope along the footpath passes—
The scourge of asses—
With melancholy settled in his spleen.

By Temple Bar I lean again,

Haunted by many a famous face,
With oddest pictures in my brain,
Jumbling together time and place:
The night drops down, the moonlight fades
Along the filmy City sky;

With draggled hose and broken blades

The Mohawks come with shriek and cry; And in the light, the dim street clothing, I see with loathing

Two hideous rebels' heads that rot on high.

And as I stand, there wander by

Earnestly talking as they go

A burly man with wig awry,

And a spare wanderer pale as snow; The moonlight, on their faces cast,

Illumes them-shadows proud and worn,

The one of sorrow not yet past,

And one of greatness yet unborn; And one defies the cloud cast o'er him And born before him,

And one has blow for blow and scorn for scorn.

The morning breaks!-They pass along,
The base-born poet and the hack;

A lord reels by, with tipsy song,

And fills a gutter at their back;

Then, passing up a narrow lane,

Begrimed with smoke and black with soot,

Led by a droning dying strain

Of melody, I watch a mute
And ragged crowd of urchins muster,
Wide-mouth'd, and cluster

Round simple Goldsmith playing on his flute.

Enough-enough-of dreams like these;
A poet's visions scant and vain,
A flock of wandering images

That please the heart, inspire the brain.

The vagrant shadows pass away,

And I am left alone at last;

The pageants fade to common day,
The pleasant dream is overcast;

And in the centre of the City,

Its pain and pity,

Standing, I ache with echoes from the past.

But the great City in its strife

Grows, while brown Labour digs and delves,

And ghosts of its forgotten life

Haunt it, like shadows of ourselves;

They work beside us night and day,

And we in their clear footprints tread:

We are a part of them, for they

Hinted the problems we have read; And the great City, in whose bosom Our children blossom,

Is troubled with the glory of its Dead.

B.

Domestic Life.

EVERY nation has had its own ideal of the best form of Domestic Life, and no two nations have agreed as to which is the noblest pattern. The Greeks thought it meant the gynæconitis on the one side, where the women sat and spun together without danger of master or man intruding; and the andronitis on the other, where hetaire and flatterers, slaves, jesters, and poets trooped noisily to the symposium held in the largest of the rooms ranged round the peristyle. To preserve the immaculate matron and spotless virgin in a kind of honourable captivity, that so the blood of the autochthones might be kept pure from all suspicion of foreign intermingling, while Laïs and Phryne enlivened the dull hours in the banqueting-room, seemed to the victors of Marathon and the founders of the Academia the wisest form of domestic life possible to them. They had learned nothing yet of the equality of woman, and therefore saw no evil in this division of her functions. On the one hand Laïs and Phryne are companionable, and able to take their part in any kind of talk that may be going on, keen of wit, bright in repartee, gay of humour, but of unhonoured birth and low morals, not fit to be the wives of honest citizens, or to kneel before the gods of the sacred hearth on the other, the matrons and virgins hidden there in the gynæconitis are well born and virtuous enough, but profoundly stupid and illiterate, able only to take care of the children, and to superintend the weaving and cooking, but in no wise meet companions for men who can grasp the finest subtleties of the Sophists, and follow the Academicians in all the mazes of their speculations. So little are they the companions of the men, and so brittle is their boasted virtue supposed to be, that they dare not show themselves in public at all without the leave of father or husband; very rarely with it. They have only a narrow pathway allowed them, and may not stray an inch beyond the spiny bordering. They may not go to market, excepting to the flower-market as equivocal violet-sellers and garland-makers; they may not go too frequently to the temples, for, as the mothers of Grecian citizens, they have honour enough from the gods, and want no further notice from heaven; they must never go to comedies, seldom to tragedies; they may not be present at the Olympic games, nor be admitted to the Eleusinian mysteries, nor have a place in the caves of the oracles-unless as priestesses chosen for the worship; they may not see a strange man in the absence of their husbands, nor eat at the family table in the presence of a male guest; in a word, at all times and in all places, they are to hold themselves as lower and meaner than men, and to be thankful for any stray crumbs that may fall from the feast they are not permitted to join. Certainly, as a slight counterbalance to all this isolation and claustral seclusion, they may take public part in certain processions and solemnities, which are mainly useful as show times, when the youth of the city assemble to look at the unmarried daughters of their fathers'