Gifford, the late editor of the Quarterly Review, and the author of the Baviad and Maeviad, was in early youth doomed to struggle with poverty, obscurity, ill health, and every hardship which could check the rise of genius. He has himself described the effect produced on his mind, under these circumstances, by his attachment to an amiable and gentle girl. "I crept on," he says, "in silent discontent, unfriended and unpitied; indignant at the present, careless of the future,--an object at once of apprehension and dislike. From this state of abjectness, I was raised by a young woman of my own class. She was a neighbour; and whenever I took my solitary walk with my Wolfius in my pocket, she usually came to the door, and by a smile, or a short question, put in the friendliest manner, endeavoured to solicit my attention. My heart had been long shut to kindness; but the sentiment was not dead within me; it revived at the first encouraging word; and the gratitude I felt for it, was the first pleasing sensation I had ventured to entertain for many dreary months." There are two little effusions inserted in the notes to the Baviad and Maeviad, which have since been multiplied by copies, and have found their way into almost all collections of lyric poetry and "Elegant Extracts;" one of these was composed during the life of Anna; the other, written after her death, and beginning, I wish I were where Anna lies, For I am sick of lingering here, is extremely striking from its unadorned simplicity and profound pathos.--Such was not the prevailing style of amatory verse at the time it was written, nearly fifty years ago. Mr. Gifford never married; and the effect of this early disappointment could be traced in his mind and constitution to the last moments of his life. The same sad bereavement which tended to make Gifford a caustic critic and satirist, made Mr. Bowles a sentimental poet. The subject of his Sonnets was real; but he who has pointed out the difference between natural and fabricated feeling, should not have left a _blank_ for the name of her he laments. He gives us indeed a formal permission to fill up the blank with any name we choose. But it is not the same thing; the name of the woman who inspired a poet, is quite as important to posterity, as the name of the poet himself. Who was the Hannah, whose fickleness occasioned that exquisite little poem which Montgomery has inscribed "To the memory of her who is dead to me?" It tells a tale of youthful love, of trusting affection, suddenly and eternally blighted,--and with such a brevity, such a simplicity, such a fervent yet heart-broken earnestness, that I fear it must be true!