'This England never did, nor never shall Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself... Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true.' There is much virtue in an 'if,' and the poet repeats the warning in another play. In '3 Henry VI.' Hastings says: 'Why, knows not Montague that of itself England is safe, if true within itself?' That, again, which most troubles John of Gaunt, in the passage already quoted, is the fact that England, which was wont to conquer others, 'Hath made a shameful conquest of itself;' while Chorus, in 'Henry V.,' laments that France has found in England 'a nest of hollow bosoms, which he fills with treacherous crowns,' adding, 'What might'st thou do, that honour would thee do, Were all thy children kind and natural?' Here, then, is a lesson for our times. What Shakespeare felt to be true in his own day is equally, nay more, true now--that England, 'set in a silver sea,' is safe from all assaults, save those which she may suffer at the hands of her own 'degenerate and ingrate' sons. HEREDITY IN SONG. It is said that the verses in a recent number of _Macmillan's Magazine_, entitled 'In Capri,' and signed 'W. Wordsworth,' are from the pen of a grandson of the famous author of 'The Excursion.' They are gracefully written, in an agreeable rhythm, and with much command of felicitous expression. If, therefore, the writer has indeed the relationship to the great Wordsworth which rumour assigns him, the fact is interesting, and suggests some considerations as to the transmission of the poetic faculty from one generation to another. One might have thought that this transmission would have been tolerably common; that the sons at least, if not the grandsons, of a genuine poet could scarcely fail to inherit something of their progenitor's peculiar powers. One might even have supposed that poetry would run--as other things have run--in families, making the 'bards' almost a _gens_, or class, by themselves. Poetry, after all, is an affair mainly of the temperament--of fancy and imagination, of feeling and passion; and these are qualities which one might have imagined would be handed down, not greatly impaired, from father to son, and so on, for at least a fairly prolonged period.