'I said to my heart, between sleeping and waking, Thou wild thing, that always art leaping and aching, What black, brown, or fair, in what clime, in what nation, By turns has not taught thee this pit-a-pat-ation?' Then there were the Lady Wortley Montagu, with her lines to Congreve; and Chesterfield, with his 'Advice to a Lady in Autumn'; Fielding, with his inimitable epistles to Walpole; and Goldsmith, with his incomparable 'Retaliation.' Later, again, came Cowper, with his 'Nose and Eyes' and 'Names of Little Note'; Byron, with his verses 'To Tom Moore'; Moore himself, with his 'Time I've Lost in Wooing'; Barham, with his 'Lines left at Hook's'; Peacock, Canning, James Smith, Praed, and Mahony; and, still later, Hood, with his 'Clapham Academy'; Brough, with his 'Neighbour Nelly'; Mortimer Collins, with his tribute to his 'Old Coat'; and a hundred others, all of whom could play delightfully on the familiar string. And, happily, the manufacture of familiar verse still goes on swimmingly. The Laureate has engaged in it, and even Mr. Browning has condescended to it. It has never, in the whole course of its career, been written better than by Mr. Holmes and Mr. Lowell, and, among ourselves, by Mr. Frederick Locker and Mr. Austin Dobson. No age, indeed, was ever more favourable than our own for the composition of verse which should, above all things, never be betrayed into exaggeration--which may have, if it please, a _soupcon_ of wit and humour, and even of sentiment, but which should, in particular, be tolerant and urbane. SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND. It was with true instinct that one of our most vigorous orators, desiring the other day to emphasize by quotation an appeal to the patriotic sentiments of his audience, went to a play of Shakespeare's for the passage. For the bard of Avon is _par excellence_ the poet of England. Keen as, in later years, has been the love of country displayed by such men as Thomson, Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, and Mr. Swinburne, it is in the pages of Shakespeare that we find the most magnificent outbursts of national feeling. Let it be granted that the poet has not hesitated to throw a few satiric pebbles at his countrymen. Everybody will recall the amusing colloquy in 'Hamlet,' in which the Gravedigger humorously reflects upon the sanity of the English people, declaring that, if Hamlet be mad, it will not be noted in England, for there the men are as mad as he is. And then there is that other diverting colloquy in 'Othello,' wherein Iago stigmatizes Englishmen as 'most potent in potting,' asserting that they 'drink with facility your Dane dead drunk,' so expert is your Englishman in his drinking.