[Footnote 19:  He gives this piece of autobiography in his first sermon preached before Edward VI., 1549:—­“My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or foure pound by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men.  He had a walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine.  He kept me to school.  He married my sisters with five pound, or twenty nobles a piece; so that he brought them up in godliness.”]

[Footnote 20:  Lower’s “English Surnames; an Essay on Family Nomenclature,” may be profitably studied in connexion with this curious subject.]

[Footnote 21:  Fortunate names, the bona nomina of Cicero, were chiefly selected in accordance with the classic maxim, bonum nomen, bonum omen.]

[Footnote 22:  “Plautus thought it quite enough to damn a man that he bore the name of Lyco, which is said to signify a greedy-wolf; and Livy calls the name Atrius Umber abominandi ominis nomen, a name of horrible portent.”—­Nares’ Heraldic Anomalies.]

[Footnote 23:  The names adopted by the Romans were very significant.  The Nomen was indicative of the branch of the family distinguished by the Cognomen; while the Prenomen was invented to distinguish one from the rest.  Thus, a man of family had three names, and even a fourth was added when it was won by great deeds.]

[Footnote 24:  Edgar Poe’s account of the regular mode by which he designed and executed his best and most renowned poem, “The Raven,” is an instance of the use of methodical rule successfully applied to what appears to be one of the most fanciful of mental works.]

[Footnote 25:  The old poet is the most fresh and powerful in his words.  The passage is thus given in Wright’s edition:—­

    The busy lark, messenger of day,
    Saluteth in her song the morrow gray;
    And fiery Phoebus riseth up so bright,
    That all the orient laugheth of the light.

Leigh Hunt remarks with justice that “Dryden falls short of the freshness and feeling of the sentiment.  His lines are beautiful, but they do not come home to us with so happy and cordial a face.”]

[Footnote 26:  This use of what most persons would consider waste paper, obtained for the poet the designation of “paper-sparing Pope.”]

[Footnote 27:  Dr. Johnson, in noticing the MSS. of Milton, preserved at Cambridge, has made, with his usual force of language, the following observation:  “Such reliques show how excellence is acquired:  what we hope ever to do with ease, we may learn first to do with diligence.”]

[Footnote 28:  Silent in the MS. (observes a critical friend) is greatly superior to secret, as it appears in the printed work.]

[Footnote 29:  The great feature of the modern stage within the last twenty years has been the Classical Burlesque Drama, which, though originating in the last century in such plays as Midas, really reached its culmination under the auspices of Madame Vestris.]