Who on his staff is this? we ask with Ossian; who is this whose head is white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step? “It is thy father, O Morar!” dead and gone Morar: “the father of no son but thee.... Weep, thou father of Morar; weep, but thy son heareth thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead—low their pillow of dust.” This flies sure to the old man’s heart, says Schiller’s Illo of the elder Piccolomini, ... “He has his whole life long Fretted and toil’d to raise his ancient house From a count’s title to the name of prince; And now must seek a grave for his only son.” Peter the Great, whether guilty or not of putting to death his elder son, Alexis, was inconsolable for the loss of the only remaining one. It was the fate of Queen Anne to lose, at twelve years of age, the hopeful young prince who alone survived of all her very many children. Samuel Richardson was the saddened survivor of all his five sons and a daughter. The celebrated Dutch philosopher and mathematician, ’Sgravesande, who, by the way, was born within the same year with Richardson, lost his two sons within eight days of each other, and is honoured for the Christian resignation with which he bore the sharp trial. Sir John Vanbrugh lost his only son at the battle of Tournay. Bishop Warburton died not long after his only son, who was carried off by a decline in the springtide of life. It is of a distinguished Swiss littérateur, who died in his prime, that Sainte-Beuve somewhere says _que sa destinée tranchée avant l’heure a pourtant été complète, si un père octogénaire ne lui survivait_. “I ought to have gone before him: I wonder he went so young,” wails the aged mother in Mr. Tennyson’s poem, all whose children have gone before her, she is so old. The gathering sorrows which clouded the latter years of Bishop Percy, “after a life in the main prosperous and happy,” commenced with the loss of an only son. Lord Kenyon died in 1802, “sorrow-stricken by the loss of his eldest son, after having accumulated a fortune of £300,000.” Lord Stowell lost his son, aged forty-two, about two months only before he too fell on death. Sprengel, the very learned German physician, never recovered the stroke of his son’s loss. Cuvier’s four children all died before him. “Write ye this man childless:” many a man of genius has felt his heart sink and his strength fail under that blighting sentence. In his sixty-seventh year we find Moore writing, “The last of our five children is now gone, and we are left desolate and alone. Not a single relative have I now left in the world.” How Mr. Hallam was successively bereaved of sons so rich in promise, if not in performance, is too well known.