The beauties of their life, and their tragic death, were given by the poet-laureate of the day in the words I have just transcribed; and such an impression did these make on the minds of the inhabitants, that the whole population took them to heart, and, with tears in their eyes, taught them to their children, even unto the third and fourth generations.

John Kay was laureate in the reign of King Edward the Fourth; Andrew Bernard in that of King Henry the Seventh; John Skelton in that of King Henry the Eighth, and Edmund Spenser in that of Queen Elizabeth.

He mourned in verse the death of Cromwell and the death of his successor, successively defended the theological positions of the Church of England and the Church of Rome, changed his religion and became Poet Laureate to James II., and acquiesced with perfect equanimity in the Revolution which brought in his successor.

Not in vain was he appointed laureate at the death of Wordsworth, in 1850; for, almost alone among those who have held the office, he felt the importance of his place, and filled and honored it.

" This dignified, though trenchant, rejoinder would have been unanswerable; but the writer goes on to charge the Laureate with spreading calumnies.

Daniel was no otherwise Laureate than his position in the queen's household may authorize that title.

Thomas Shadwell was the Poet-Laureate after Dryden, assuming the wreath in 1689.

He appears to have been in these years a silent senator, taking little interest or share in the debates, but retiring from them to offer the quit-rent of his versiclesa laureate without salary, and yet not probably much more sincere than laureates generally are; for although his loyalty was undoubted, his expressions of it in rhyme are often hyperbolical to a degree.

Instead of this, however, he has allowed himself to write rather worse than any Laureate before him, and has betaken himself to the luckless and vulgar expedient of endeavouring to face out the thing by an air of prodigious confidence and assumption:and has had the usual fortune of such undertakers, by becoming only more conspicuously ridiculous.

*** "Where was the Poet Laureate during the visit of President Wilson?" asks a correspondent in a contemporary.

Charles, during the heat of the Popish plot, was so far from being in a situation to incur odium by dismissing a laureate for having written a Protestant play, that he was obliged for a time to throw the reins of government into the hands of those very persons to whom the Papists were most obnoxious.

[Footnote 3: 'Grafton': this noble peer, remarkable for sublimity of parts, by virtue of his office (Lord Chamberlain) conferred the laureate on Colley Cibber, Esq., a delectable bard, whose character has already employed, together with his own, the greatest pens of the age.]