At last, ere he was thirty-one, the 'dreary old sort of feel,' and the 'rigid fibre and stiffening limbs,' of which Byron and Burns, when scarcely older, complained, began to assail Rochester. He had exhausted his capacity of enjoyment by excess, and had deprived himself of the consolations of religion by infidelity. His unbelief was not like Shelley's--the growth of his own mind, and the fruit of unbridled, though earnest, speculation;--it was merely a drug which he snatched from the laboratories of others to deaden his remorse, and enable him to look with desperate calmness to the blotted Past and the lowering Future. At this stage of his career, he became acquainted with Bishop Burnet, who has recorded his conversion and edifying end in a book which, says Johnson, 'the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety.' To this, after Johnson's example, we refer our readers. Eochester died July 26, 1680, before he had completed his thirty-fourth year. He was married, and left three daughters and a son named Charles, who did not long survive his father. With him the male line ceased, and the title was conferred on a younger son of Lord Clarendon. His poems appeared in the year of his death, professing on the title-page to be printed at Antwerp. They contain much that is spurious, but some productions that are undoubtedly Rochester's. They are at the best, poor fragmentary exhibitions of a vigorous, but undisciplined mind. His songs are rather easy than lively. His imitations are distinguished by grace and spirit. His 'Nothing' is a tissue of clever conceits, like gaudy weeds growing on a sterile soil, but here and there contains a grand and gloomy image, such as-- 'And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face.' His 'Satire against Man' might be praised for its vigorous misanthropy, but is chiefly copied from Boileau. Rochester may be signalised as the first thoroughly depraved and vicious person, so far as we remember, who assumed the office of the satirist, --the first, although not, alas! the last human imitator of 'Satan accusing Sin.' Some satirists before him had been faulty characters, while rather inconsistently assailing the faults of others; but here, for the first time, was a man of no virtue, or belief in virtue whatever, (his tenderness to his family, revealed in his letters, is just that of the tiger fondling his cubs, and seeming, perhaps, to _them_ a 'much- misrepresented character,') and whose life was one mass of wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores,--a naked satyr who gloried in his shame, --becoming a severe castigator of public morals and of private character. Surely there was a gross anomaly implied in this, which far greater genius than Rochester's could never have redeemed. SONG. 1 Too late, alas! I must confess, You need not arts to move me; Such charms by nature you possess, 'Twere madness not to love ye.