[Sidenote: _Disputed Authorship._] Often he refined instead of soaring. In place of sympathising he was ever striving to concentrate men's regards on himself. Egotism is not inconsistent with the heat of inspiration, when it is unconscious, when the poet sings because he must, and bares his own heart. Ralegh rarely loses command of himself. He is perpetually seen registering the effects his flights produce. Apparently he had no ambition for popular renown as a poet. He did not print his verses. He cannot be said to have claimed any of them but the _Farewell to the Court_. His authorship of some, now admitted to be by him, has been confidently questioned. A critic so judicious as Hallam, for reasons which he does not hint, and a student as laborious as Isaac D'Israeli, have doubted his title to _The Lie_, otherwise described as _The Soul's Errand_, which seems to demonstrate his authorship by its scornful and cynical haughtiness embodied in a wave of magnificent rhythm. Verses, instinct with his peculiar wit, like _The Silent Lover_, have been given away to Lord Pembroke, Sir Robert Ayton, and others. Its famous stanza-- Silence in love bewrays more woe Than words, though ne'er so witty; A beggar that is dumb, you know, Deserveth double pity! was in the middle of last century boldly assigned to Lord Chesterfield. His compositions circulated from hand to hand at Court. They were read in polished coteries. So little did they ever become a national possession that, complete or incomplete, the most considerable of them has vanished, all but a fragment. Small as is the whole body of verse attributed to him, not all is clearly his. Dr. Hannah, and other ardent admirers of his muse, have been unable to satisfy themselves whether he really wrote _False Love and True Love_, with its shifting rhythm, and its bewitching scattered phrases; the Shepherd's fantastically witty _Description of Love_, or _Anatomy of Love_-- It is a yea, it is a nay; or the perfect conceit, which Waller could not have bettered in wit or equalled in vivacity, with the refrain-- What care I how fair she be! Twenty-seven other poems, among them, the bright sneering _Invective against Women_, have been put down to him on no other ground than that they cannot be traced to a different source. He might have been the author of the graceful _Praise of his Sacred Diana_. He might have sighed for a land devoid of envy, Unless among The birds, for prize of their sweet song. From him might have come the airy melody of the charming eclogue _Phyllida's Love-call to her Corydon_, which invites the genius of a Mendelssohn to frame it in music. He might have penned in his prison cell the knell for the tragedy of human life, _De Morte_. He might have been the shepherd minstrel of the flowers-- You pretty daughters of the earth and sun.