When his stanza forced him to lop off this vain superfluity of words, that the sense might be brought within a narrower compass, he succeeded better. Who would suppose, that these verses could have proceeded from the same man that had written the well known song, beginning "And are ye sure the news is true," from which there is not a word that can he taken without injury, and which seems so well to answer the description of a simple and popular song in Shakspeare? --It is old and plain: The songsters, and the knitters in the sun, And the free maids that weave their threads with bone, Do use to chaunt it. It is silly sooth, And dallies with the innocence of love, Like the old age. Syr Martyn is the longest of his poems. He could not have chosen a subject in itself much less capable of embellishment. But whatever the pomp of machinery or profuseness of description could contribute to its decoration has not been spared. After an elaborate invocation of the powers that preside over the stream of Mulla, a "reverend wizard" is conjured up in the eye of the poet; and the wizard in his turn conjures up scene after scene, in which appear the hopeful young knight, Syr Martyn, "possest of goodly Baronie," the dairy-maid, Kathrin, by whose wiles he is inveigled into an illicit amour, the good aunt who soon dies of chagrin at this unworthy attachment, the young brood who are the offspring of the ill-sorted match, his brother, an openhearted sailor, who is hindered by the artifices of Kathrin from gaining access to the house, and lastly, the "fair nymph Dissipation," with whom Syr Martyn seeks refuge from his unpleasant recollections, and who conspires with "the lazy fiend, Self-Imposition," to conduct him to the "dreary cave of Discontent," where the poet leaves him, and "the reverend wizard" (for aught we hear to the contrary) in his company. Mean and familiar incidents and characters do not sort well with allegory, which requires beings that are themselves somewhat removed from the common sphere of human nature to meet and join it a little beyond the limits of this world. Yet in this tale, incongruous and disjointed as the dream of a sick man, velut aegri somnia, he has interspersed some lines, and even whole stanzas, to which the poet or the painter may turn again and again with delight, though the common reader will scarce find them sufficient to redeem the want of interest that pervades the whole. His elegy on Mary, Queen of Scots, is also a vision, but it is better managed, at once mournful and sweet. He has thrown a pall of gorgeous embroidery over the bloody hearse of Mary. Wolfwold and Ella, of which the story was suggested by a picture of Mortimer's, is itself a picture, in which the fine colouring and spirited attitudes reconcile us to its horrors.