Mr. Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest, as in the
"Song of Four Seasons" and "The Dead Letter." He has ingenuity, pathos,
mastery of his art, and, though the least pedantic of poets, is
"conveniently learned."

Of contemporary Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse of Mr.
Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the "Heathen
Chinee," as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of children that
slipped its moorings in the fog. To me it seems that Mr. Bret Harte's
poems have never (at least in this country) been sufficiently esteemed.
Mr. Lowell has written ("The Biglow Papers" apart) but little in this
vein. Mr. Wendell Holmes, your delightful godfather, Gifted, has written
much with perhaps some loss from the very quantity. A little of _vers de
societe_, my dear Gifted, goes a long way, as you will think, if ever you
sit down steadily to read right through any collection of poems in this
manner. So do not add too rapidly to your own store; let them be "few,
but roses" all of them.




RICHARDSON


_By Mrs. Andrew Lang_.

Dear Miss Somerville,--I was much interested in your fruitless struggle
to read "Sir Charles Grandison,"--the book whose separate numbers were
awaited with such impatience by Richardson's endless lady friends and
correspondents, and even by the rakish world--even by Colley Cibber