It will be remembered that in sketching the English Romantic Movement the fact was recorded that the boys Warton and Chatterton occupied a place of prescience with regard to these new ideas. It will be worth while calling to mind that Irwin Russell's relation to the Southern Romantic Movement was much the same. Already at sixteen years of age, he had begun to write and ten years later he had completed his work and returned his talents to him who gave them. The parallel to be drawn between the life of Chatterton and of Russell is interesting if not suggestive of actual brotherhood of thought. As mere boys they both began to write verse. They both made use of a medium other than mother tongue. Chatterton manufactured for himself a speech we cannot do better than describe as the Rowley dialect; Russell put into form the rude speech of the negro with whom he had grown up; yet he had no help in the difficult work of transcriber. Chatterton found the tasks set for him in a lawyer's office unbearable while there was poetry in his mind to be written down; Russell was actually admitted to the bar but the Muse of Letters had marked him for her own and the courtroom knew him no more. Breaking away from the bondage of legal drudgery, Chatterton went with high hopes from Bristol to London where for a few short months "the unhappy boy" strove against starvation only at last to be overcome in the struggle for living. Russell left Port Gibson and went to New York to enter upon a literary life but after buffetings not a few, he at last entered into the eternal rest not vouchsafed on earth to that weary, outworn body. Chatterton may be granted place as forerunner of that noble body of poets who have had part in making the poetry of the Nineteenth Century as distinct contribution to English literature. Before Irwin Russell there were, indeed, fore-gleams of the day that was to dawn, but it may not unfairly be urged that he was the first to turn his camera on one section of our Southern life and give us a picture that has cause to be enumerated among the monuments which must be consulted as primary authorities by the historian who will picture the life and thought of the Southern people. WILLIAM WARD, A MISSISSIPPI POET ENTITLED TO DISTINCTION. BY DABNEY LIPSCOMB A gentleman of advanced age, ripe culture, and extensive knowledge of the literature of the State, was asked, "Who is the best poet Mississippi has produced?" Promptly he replied, "William Ward of Macon." Respect for the opinion of the one who so unhesitatingly adjudged this pre-eminence among the poets of the State led to a study of William Ward's life and poetry, the result of which is now presented.