“The Biblioclastic Dead
      Have diverse pains to brook,
   They break Affliction’s bread
      With Betty Barnes, the Cook,”

as the author of “The Bird Bride” sings.

Miss Stoddart had just informed me of this disaster, which left one almost hopeless of ever owning a copy of “The Death Wake,” when I found a brown paper parcel among many that contained to-day’s minor poetry “with the author’s compliments,” and lo, in this unpromising parcel was the long-sought volume!  Ever since one was a small boy, reading Stoddart’s “Scottish Angler,” and old Blackwood’s, one had pined for a sight of “The Necromaunt,” and here, clean in its “pure purple mantle” of smooth cloth, lay the desired one!

   “Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,
   It gave itself, and was not bought,”

being, indeed, the discovery and gift of a friend who fishes and studies the Lacustrine Muses.

The copy has a peculiar interest; it once belonged to Aytoun, the writer of “The Scottish Cavaliers,” of “The Bon Gaultier Ballads,” and of “Firmilian,” the scourge of the Spasmodic School.  Mr. Aytoun has adorned the margins with notes and with caricatures of skulls and cross-bones, while the fly-leaves bear a sonnet to the author, and a lyric in doggerel.  Surely this is, indeed, a literary curiosity.  The sonnet runs thus:—­

   “O wormy Thomas Stoddart, who inheritest
      Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words and rare,
   Tell me, my friend, why is it that thou ferretest
      And gropest in each death-corrupted lair? 
   Seek’st thou for maggots such as have affinity
      With those in thine own brain, or dost thou think
      That all is sweet which hath a horrid stink? 
   Why dost thou make Haut-gout thy sole divinity? 
   Here is enough of genius to convert
      Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare,
   Then why transform the diamond into dirt,
      And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair,
   Into a medley of creations foul,
   As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul?”

No doubt Mr. Stoddart’s other passion for angling, in which he used a Scottish latitude concerning bait, {7} impelled him to search for “worms and maggots":—­

   “Fire and faggots,
   Worms and maggots,”

as Aytoun writes on the other fly-leaf, are indeed the matter of “The Death Wake.”

Then, why, some one may ask, write about “The Death Wake” at all?  Why rouse again the nightmare of a boy of twenty?  Certainly I am not to say that “The Death Wake” is a pearl of great price, but it does contain passages of poetry—­of poetry very curious because it is full of the new note, the new melody which young Mr. Tennyson was beginning to waken.  It anticipates Beddoes, it coincides with Gautier and Les Chimeres of Gerard, it answers the accents, then unheard in England, of Poe.  Some American who read out