The Ogden Nash pocket book; America's light-hearted laureate.

The respect he began, after a lifetime of neglect, to receive in the years immediately before his death, was paid not to the conservative laureate of 1848, but to the revolutionary in art and politics of fifty years before.

Nor did he neglect to smooth the way, by inscribing the piece to the Earl of Leicester, brother of Algernon Sidney, who had borne arms against Charles in the civil war; and yet, Whig or republican as he was, had taste and feeling enough to patronise the degraded laureate and proscribed Catholic.

Of Virginia's marriage Torquato Tasso, the Grand Duchess Bianca's enamoured poet-laureate, sang: "Cio che morte rallenta Amore restringa!

But there was even worse: a female laureate licensed by the Institute, Madame Augustus Craven, author of Recit d'une soeur, of Eliane and Fleaurange, puffed into reputation by the whole apostolic press.

These are the patient laureates Whose voices, trained below, Ascend in ceaseless carol, Inaudible, indeed, To us, the duller scholars Of the mysterious bard!

Dr. Holmes, our genial and many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a philosopher, in his "Life of Emerson," has finely worked out the theory that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that when he loves the character he delineates, it is in some measure his own, or at least one of which he feels its tendencies and possibilities belong to himself.

This peculiarity is what will most strike every stranger in the appearance of the accomplished laureate.

He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong.