to its end with Cardinal Henry dying as the pensioner of George the Third, and with Prince Charles drowning in Cyprus wine the once gallant spirit which, even at the end, could sometimes shake off its degradation, and blaze into a moment's despairing brilliancy, at the thought of the Clans and the Claymores, and the brave days of Forty-five. And so, in the words of the old Saga men, here he drops out of the tale. [Sidenote: 1745-1889--The Stuart charm] But it is the curious characteristic of the ill-fated House of Stuart that, through all their misfortunes, through all their degradations, they have contrived to captivate the imagination and bewitch the hearts of many generations. The Stuart influence upon literature has been astonishing. No cause in the world has rallied to its side so many poets, named or nameless, has so profoundly attracted the writers and the readers of romance, has bitten more deeply {235} into popular fancy. Even in our own day, an English poet, Mr. Swinburne, who has not tuned much to thrones fallen or standing, has been inspired by the old Stuart frenzy to write one of the most valuable of all the wealth of ballads that have grown up around the Stuart name. In his "A Jacobite's Exile, 1746," Mr. Swinburne has summed up in lines of the most poignant and passionate pathos all the feeling of a gentleman of the North Country dwelling in exile for his king's sake. The emotion which finds such living voice in the contemporary poetry, in the ballads that men wrote and men sang, while the House of Stuart was still a reality, while there were still picturesque or semi-picturesque personages living in foreign courts and claiming the crown of England, finds no less living voice in the words written by a poet of to-day, though nearly a century has elapsed, since the hopes of the House of Stuart went out forever. "We'll see nae mair the sea-banks fair, And the sweet, gray, gleaming sky, And the lordly strand of Northumberland, And the goodly towers thereby: And none shall know, but the winds that blow, The graves wherein we lie."