chanted--every one much over forty, at all events. "I'll hang my
Harp on a Willow Tree," and "I'd be a Butterfly," and "Oh, no! we
never mention Her," are dimly dear to every friend of Mr. Richard
Swiveller. If to be sung everywhere, to hear your verses uttered in
harmony with all pianos and quoted by the world at large, be fame,
Bayly had it. He was an unaffected poet. He wrote words to airs,
and he is almost absolutely forgotten. To read him is to be carried
back on the wings of music to the bowers of youth; and to the bowers
of youth I have been wafted, and to the old booksellers. You do not
find on every stall the poems of Bayly; but a copy in two volumes
has been discovered, edited by Mr. Bayly's widow (Bentley, 1844).
They saw the light in the same year as the present critic, and
perhaps they ceased to be very popular before he was breeched. Mr.
Bayly, according to Mrs. Bayly, "ably penetrated the sources of the
human heart," like Shakespeare and Mr. Howells. He also "gave to
minstrelsy the attributes of intellect and wit," and "reclaimed even
festive song from vulgarity," in which, since the age of Anacreon,
festive song has notoriously wallowed. The poet who did all this
was born at Bath in Oct. 1797. His father was a genteel solicitor,
and his great-grandmother was sister to Lord Delamere, while he had
a remote baronet on the mother's side. To trace the ancestral
source of his genius was difficult, as in the case of Gifted
Hopkins; but it was believed to flow from his maternal grandfather,
Mr. Freeman, whom his friend, Lord Lavington, regarded as "one of
the finest poets of his age." Bayly was at school at Winchester,
where he conducted a weekly college newspaper. His father, like
Scott's, would have made him a lawyer; but "the youth took a great
dislike to it, for his ideas loved to dwell in the regions of
fancy," which are closed to attorneys. So he thought of being a
clergyman, and was sent to St. Mary's Hall, Oxford. There "he did