opinions and private history, and, so far as they go, exhibit his disposition in an advantageous light. From one of them it appears that he suffered in his latter days from 'a distemper seated in my head.' His tantalizing gleams of talent as a lyrist have been already mentioned. [Sidenote: Thomas Southern (1660-1746).] Thomas Southern undoubtedly belonged to the genus playwright, and has none of the flashes of poetry which occasionally seem to exalt Crowne to a higher rank. His distinction rather arises from the financial success of his pieces, which was such that he died 'the richest of all our poets, a very few excepted.' For this, however, he is said to have been indebted not so much to the actual vogue of his pieces as to his assiduity in soliciting tickets. It is to be wished that he had been equally assiduous in collecting facts about Shakespeare, if, as is somewhat doubtfully asserted, his father came from Stratford-on-Avon. He was born at Dublin in 1660, and is said to have been a servitor at Oxford and a student at the Middle Temple. This he forsook for the army, but his service cannot have been of long duration. His first play, _The Loyal Brother_ (1682), was designed to compliment the Duke of York upon the failure of the Exclusion Bill. He was not a very industrious writer, producing only ten plays down to 1726, and of these only two, _The Fatal Marriage_ (1694) and _Oroonoko_ (1696), had any considerable reputation even in his own day. Both, however, kept the stage until an advanced period of the nineteenth century. The diction of both pieces, though never rising into poetry, and interlarded with dull scenes intended to be comic, is by no means contemptible; the main strength, however, consists in the situations, which are really powerful, and in the writer's art in arousing an interest both in his innocent and his mixed characters. Respected as a relic of the past, a decorous church-goer with silver hair, Southern lived far into the eighteenth century, and came sufficiently under its influence to repent of his mingling of tragic and comic action in the same piece; which indeed he had reason to regret, not because he had done it, but because he had not done it better. [Sidenote: Thomas Shadwell (1640-1692).] Thomas Shadwell is remarkable as the leading Whig votary of _belles lettres_ after the death of Marvell, a distinction which secured him the laureateship upon the cashiering of Dryden. To call him poet would be a gross misapplication of the term, and Dryden's withering couplet might seem justified if he had nothing but his serious verse to rely upon: 'With all his bulk, there's nothing lost in Og, For every inch that is not fool is rogue.'