“Tender his words, and eloquently wise; Mild the pure fervor of his watchful eyes; Meek with serenity and constant prayer, The luminous forehead, high and broad and bare. The thin mouth, though not passionless, yet still With a sweet calm that speaks an angel’s will. Resolving service to his God’s behest, And ever musing how to serve _him_ best, Not old, nor young; with manhood’s gentlest grace, Pale to transparency the pensive face, Pale not with sickness but with studious thought, The body tasked, the fine mind overwrought; With something faint and fragile in the whole, As though ‘twere but a lamp to hold a soul.” PART SECOND.—POET. And here, first, a few words on the prose writings of Southwell. We have already referred to the remarkable letter of admonition by him addressed to his father. It is a severe test to put the prose of any cultivated language to that of comparison with the productions of the same tongue nearly three centuries later. And yet this letter will support such comparison surprisingly well both as to substance and style. The reader will bear in mind the peculiar circumstances under which Southwell addressed this LETTER TO HIS FATHER. “I am not of so unnatural a kind, of so wild an education, or so unchristian a spirit, as not to remember the root out of which I have branched, or to forget my secondary maker and author of my being. It is not the carelessness of a cold affection, nor the want of a due and reverent respect, that has made me such a stranger to my native home, and so backward in defraying the debt of a thankful mind, but only the iniquity of these days that maketh my presence perilous, and the discharge of my duties an occasion of danger. I was loath to enforce an unwilling courtesy upon any, or by seeming officious to become offensive; deeming it better to let time digest the fear that my return into the realm had bred in my kindred than abruptly to intrude myself, and to purchase their danger, whose good-will I so highly esteem. I never doubted but what the belief, which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in a manner, hereditary, framed in them a right persuasion of my present calling, not suffering them to measure their censures of me by the ugly terms and odious epithets wherewith heresy hath sought to discredit my functions, but rather by the reverence of so worthy a sacrament and the sacred usages of all former ages. Yet, because I might easily perceive by apparent conjectures that many were more willing to hear of me than from me, and readier to praise than to use my endeavors, I have hitherto bridled my desire to see them by the care and jealousy of their safety; and banished myself from the scene of my cradle in my own country. I have lived like a foreigner, finding among strangers that which, in my nearest blood, I presumed not to seek.”