of Oliver must be satisfied to see how posterity vindicates him against the early and the latter detractors. He was a true English poet with an Irish heart; and Sir Joshua Reynolds evinced the genuine prescience of genius (though the world said it was only friendship or flattery) when he gave the ugly face of Oliver that classic _tournure_ which should best suit his destined rank in the peerage of Parnassus. Goldsmith had left his mark upon the literature of his age, and plainly indicated the character of that which was to come, when he quitted his painful desk forever, in 1774, being then about forty-five years old. At that age Cowper was still unmentioned in the world of letters, but was preparing to carry out the salutary innovations which the other had begun. Goldsmith died £2000 in debt. The booksellers had advanced him money for works to be written. Everybody trusted him. “Was ever poet so trusted before?” says Dr. Johnson. Burke wept when he heard Oliver was dead. Such tears were as eloquent as Johnson’s epitaph. The eyes of the latter were moistened, too; and in a sonorous Greek tetrastich, he called on those who cared for Nature, for the charms of song, or the deeds of ancient days, to weep for the historian, the naturalist, and the poet. Poor Goldie died when he had a chance of liberating himself, in another way, from the task-work of publishers. “Every year he lived,” says Dr. Johnson, “he would have deserved Westminster Abbey more and more.” But Goldsmith’s true Westminster Abbey is the _volitare per ora_ and the keeping of his honest memory by the _oi polloi_, at their firesides, along with the _lares_—when, as Macaulay would say, a traveler from the empire of Van Diemans Land may probably be sketching the ruins of that British Santa Croce from a broken arch of London Bridge:— Nothing to them the sculptor’s art, The funeral columns, wreaths or urns; as Halleck so well says respecting Robert Burns, in one of the finest of his lyrics. * * * * * MONA LISA. BY MRS. MARY G. HORSFORD. Leonardo de Vinci is said to have been four years employed upon the portrait of Mona Lisa, a fair Florentine, without being able, after all, to come up to the idea of her beauty. Artist! lay the brush aside, Twilight gathers chill and gray; Turn the picture to the wall— Thou hast wrought in vain to-day. Thrice twelve months have hastened by Since thy canvas first grew bright With that brow’s bewitching beauty, And that dark eye’s melting light. Yet the early sunbeam shineth On thy tireless labors yet, And the portrait stands before thee, Till the evening sun has set. Faultless is the robe that falleth Round that form of matchless grace; Faultless is the softened outline Of the fair and oval face.