"I'd be a butterfly, living a rover, Dying when fair things are fading away." The place in which the deathless strains welled from the singer's heart was henceforth known as "Butterfly Bower." He now wrote a novel, "The Aylmers," which has gone where the old moons go, and he became rather a literary lion, and made the acquaintance of Theodore Hook. The loss of a son caused him to write some devotional verses, which were not what he did best; and now he began to try comedies. One of them, _Sold for a Song_, succeeded very well. In the stage-coach between Wycombe Abbey and London he wrote a successful little _lever de rideau_ called _Perfection_; and it was lucky that he opened this vein, for his wife's Irish property got into an Irish bog of dishonesty and difficulty. Thirty- five pieces were contributed by him to the British stage. After a long illness, he died on April 22nd, 1829. He did not live, this butterfly minstrel, into the winter of human age. Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom Moore of much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of the most vapid and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits, trees, breeze, sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds, regret, deception, and so forth, into fervid anapaestics. Perhaps his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry composers will endure and singers will accept. Why, "words for music" are almost invariably trash now, though the words of Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister art, and don't know anything about it. But any one can see that words like Bayly's are and have long been much more popular with musical people than words like Shelley's, Keats's, Shakespeare's, Fletcher's, Lovelace's, or Carew's. The natural explanation is not flattering to musical people: at all events, the singing world doted on Bayly. "She never blamed him--never, But received him when he came With a welcome sort of shiver, And she tried to look the same. "But vainly she dissembled, For whene'er she tried to smile, A tear unbidden trembled In her blue eye all the while." This was pleasant for "him"; but the point is that these are lines to an Indian air. Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines to an Indian air; but we may "swear, and save our oath," that the singers preferred Bayly's. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal the popularity of what follows. I shall ask the persevering reader to tell me where Bayly ends, and where parody begins: