How familiar he was with Arabic and Persian is shown by the curious fact that whenever he was under strong emotion he would plunge abruptly into one or other language, sometimes writing a whole letter in it, sometimes only a sentence or two, or a few verses. Besides these Oriental ‘trifles’ as he would probably have called them, we find continual contributions to English periodical literature, and three volumes of poetry: _English Gipsy Songs in Romany_ (1875); the _Song of the Reed, and other Pieces_ (1876); and _Lyrical Songs_, &c. by John Ludwig Runeberg (1878). In the first of these he collaborated with Mr Leland, whom we mentioned before, and Miss Janet Tuckey; and in the last with Mr Magnusson; but the second is entirely his own. We regret that we cannot find room for a specimen of these graceful verses. Those who have leisure to look into the _Song of the Reed_, or the translation of Zoheir, will find themselves introduced to a new literature by one who, if not a poet, was unquestionably, as Mr Besant says, a versifier of a high order, and in the very front rank of translators. We have said that most of this work—were it grave or gay, it mattered not—had to be got through in the midst of serious anxieties. Mrs Palmer’s health began to fail before they had been married long, and it soon became evident that her lungs were affected. It was necessary that she should leave Cambridge. In the spring of 1876, Wales was tried, with results which were so reassuring that it was decided to complete her cure (as it was then believed) by a winter in Paris. There, however, she got worse instead of better, and early in the following year her husband began to realize that she would die. In the autumn of 1877, they returned home to try Wales once more, and then, as a last resource, Bournemouth. There, in the summer of 1878, Mrs Palmer died. The expenses of so long an illness, added to journeyings to and fro, and the cost of keeping up two establishments (for he was obliged to continue his Cambridge lectures all the while), crippled his resources, and produced embarrassments from which he never became wholly free. His own health, too, never strong, gave way under his fatigues and worries, and he became only not quite so ill as his wife. Yet he never complained; never said a word about his troubles to any of his friends. Those who were most with him at this dreary time have recorded that he always met them with a smiling face, and went about his work as calmly as if he had been well and happy.