Leyland was himself a poet, as I have said, and a literary critic of ability and judgment. Branwell submitted some poems to him for opinion, and he advised his friend to publish them with his name appended, rather than under the pseudonym of 'Northangerland,' for he considered them creditable to his genius. But Branwell, on July 12th, 1842, writing to Leyland, asking some technical questions, says, in a postscript, 'Northangerland has so long wrought on in secret and silence that he dare not take your kind encouragement in the light which _vanity_ would prompt him to do.' On August 10th, 1842, he wrote to Leyland in reference to a monument, which that sculptor had recently put up at Haworth, and he concluded by saying: 'When you see Mr. Constable--to whom I shall write directly,--be kind enough to tell him that--owing to my absence from home when it arrived, and to the carelessness of those who neglected to give it me on my return,--I have only _now_ received his note. Its injunctions shall be gladly attended to; but he would better please me by refraining from any slurs on the fair fame of Charles Freeman or Benjamin Caunt, Esquires.' Branwell did not lose his early interest in the 'noble science,' but continued it with a half-serious constancy. Constable and Leyland regarded the pugilistic encounters of the 'Ring' as brutal and degrading, but Branwell always professed to defend its champions with energy and zeal; and in this letter he playfully alludes to two of them. Among his literary labours of the year 1842 is the following poem. It is entitled: NOAH'S WARNING OVER METHUSALEH'S GRAVE. 'Brothers and men! one moment stay Beside your latest patriarch's grave, While God's just vengeance yet delay, While God's blest mercy yet can save. 'Will you compel my tongue to say, That underneath this nameless sod Your hands, with mine, have laid to-day The _last_ on earth who walked with God? 'Shall the pale corpse, whose hoary hairs Are just surrendered to decay, Dissolve the chain which bound our years To hundred ages passed away? 'Shall six-score years of warnings dread Die like a whisper on the wind? Shall the dark doom above your head, Its blinded victims darker find? 'Shall storms from heaven _without_ the world, Find wilder storms from hell _within_? Shall long-stored, late-come wrath be hurled; Or,--will you, can you turn from sin? 'Have patience, if too plain I speak, For time, my sons, is hastening by; Forgive me if my accents break: Shall _I_ be saved and _Nature_ die? 'Forgive that pause:--one look to Heaven Too plainly tells me, he is gone, Who long with me in vain had striven For earth and for its peace alone. 'He's gone!--my Father--full of days,-- From life which left no joy for him; Born in creation's earliest blaze; Dying--himself, its latest beam.