_The Battle of Fontenoy_ is the corner-stone of the fame of Thomas Davis as a poet. No greater battle-ballad has ever been written. Beside it the ballads of Campbell are scarcely perfect. Davis and Campbell are each typical of a distinct school of painting. Davis entered into minute detail with the love of a pre-Raphaelite; Campbell wields the brush after the manner of one of the old masters. Unhappily for his country Davis died almost suddenly in the year 1845. He had not the happiness to see the beneficial results, which ensuing years brought to the work, which he was the first to begin. His character might be pithily expressed in the words which he poetically wished might be inscribed on his tomb: "He served his country, and loved his kind." A warm heart, and a stainless name, shed lustre on the chivalrous patriot. An earnest Protestant, he was no bigot. Of gentle birth and rearing, he never narrowed his prejudices to petty distinctions of class or creed; but threw in his individual help with the humbler striving of sturdy commoner and frieze-coated peasant. The measure of national advancement, which he accomplished, did not die with him, but lives to our time. It would require little space to prove here that the literary societies, the political club assemblies, the societies for the promotion of the Irish language and industries, the discipline of national unity, which controls the whole Irish movement in our day, are but the practical sequence of the lessons which Davis and his party taught and perpetuated. And if the hour is now at hand when the hard-fought battle of a century is to be decided for us in glorious victory; if to us it is given, through the efforts of the gallant patriots who still continue the good fight, to set the banner of victory on the temple of national independence, history yet survives and points its backward finger in abiding gratitude to the unforgotten workers, who laid the foundation of the citadel, which we are to open and inhabit. JAMES H. GAVIN. * * * * * Human nature is a greater force even than laws of political economy, and the Almighty Himself has implanted in the human breast that passionate love of country which rivets with irresistible attraction the Esquimaux to his eternal snows, the Arab to his sandy desert, and the Highlander to his rugged mountains.--_Joseph Chamberlain._ Southern Sketches. XVIII. HAVANA.