Robert Southey, who held the office for thirty years; and this prolonged tenure of it, still longer than Cibber's, by a man of unimpeachable worth and distinguished genius, is a happy set-off against the disgrace which frightened Gray, and made him refuse it. The concession proposed to Gray, that he should write only when and what he chose, was also virtually, though not formally, yielded to Southey. "The performance of the annual odes," he says, "had been suspended from the time of George the Third's illness in 1810, and fell completely into disuse. Thus terminated a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance." How is it that we have yet no biography of Southey? It is rumoured that his only surviving son, the Reverend Cuthbert Southey, has one in preparation. We hope that the report is true, and that it will contain abundance of his father's delightful letters, and be published soon. _Bis dat qui cito dat_,--that is, not that a book should be got up in a hurry, but that, after a delay of five years, the reasonable expectation of Robert Southey's admirers and regretters should be now promptly gratified. We began with the earliest of laureates and the latest,--Apollo and the venerable Wordsworth,--and with them we will conclude. In a snug nook, sheltered from the north and east winds by Helvellyn, and Fairfield, Wordsworth has for many years cultivated his own laurels with success, till he is absolutely imbowered in them. The original slip, from which all this throng of greenery has sprung, is said to have been a cutting from a scion of the bay-tree planted by Petrarch at the tomb of Virgil, which tree was unquestionably derived from the undying root of that which supplied leaves for the garland of Apollo, and assuaged the divinity of his brow, when, as we reminded the reader at our outset on this ramble, he hired himself as poet-laureate to King Admetus, on a daily stipend of a hornful of milk. THE HORSE-DEALER--A TALE OF DENMARK. BY CHRISTIAN WINTHER.