his sweetly-moral lay. Cf. _The Hermit_, the _Hymn to Contentment_, the _Night Piece on Death_—which Goldsmith certainly recalled in his own _City Night-Piece_. Of the last-named Goldsmith says (_Life of Parnell_, 1770, p. xxxii), not without an obvious side-stroke at Gray’s too-popular _Elegy_, that it ‘deserves every praise, and I should suppose with very little amendment, might be made to surpass all those night pieces and church yard scenes that have since appeared.’ This is certainly (as Longfellow sings) to rustling hear in every breeze The laurels of Miltiades. Of Parnell, Hume wrote (_Essays_, 1770, i. 244) that ‘after the fiftieth reading; [he] is as fresh as at the first.’ But Gray (speaking—it should be explained—of a dubious volume of his posthumous works) said: ‘Parnell is the dung-hill of Irish Grub Street’ (Gosse’s Gray’s _Works_, 1884, ii. 372). Meanwhile, it is his fate to-day to be mainly remembered by three words (not always attributed to him) in a couplet from what Johnson styled ‘perhaps the meanest’ of his performances, the _Elegy— to an Old Beauty_:— And all that’s madly wild, or oddly gay, We call it only _pretty Fanny’s way_. THE CLOWN’S REPLY. This, though dated ‘Edinburgh 1753,’ was first printed in _Poems and Plays_, 1777, p. 79. John Trott is a name for a clown or commonplace character. Miss Burney (_Diary_, 1904, i. 222) says of Dr. Delap:—‘As to his person and appearance, they are much in the _John-trot_ style.’ Foote, Chesterfield, and Walpole use the phrase; Fielding Scotticizes it into ‘John Trott-Plaid, Esq.’; and Bolingbroke employs it as a pseudonym. I shall ne’er see your graces. ‘I shall never see a Goose again without thinking on Mr. _Neverout_,’—says the ‘brilliant Miss Notable’ in Swift’s _Polite Conversation_, 1738, p. 156. EPITAPH ON EDWARD PURDON.