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MY KATE.

BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

HE was not as pretty as women I know,

And yet all your best made of sunshine and

snow

Drop to shade, melt to nought in the long-trodden

ways,

While she's still remembered on warm and cold

days

My Kate.

Her air had a meaning, her movements a grace;
You turned from the fairest to gaze on her face:
And when you had once seen her forehead and mouth,
You saw as distinctly her soul and her truth-
My Kate.

Such a blue inner light from her eyelids outbroke,
You looked at her silence, and fancied she spoke:
When she did, so peculiar, yet soft was the tone,
Though the loudest spoke also, you heard her alone –
My Kate.

I doubt if she said to you much that could act
As a thought or suggestion: she did not attract
In the sense of the brilliant or wise: I infer

"Twas her thinking of others, made you think of her — My Kate.

She never found fault with you, never implied
Your wrong by her right; and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town,
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown-
My Kate.

None knelt at her feet confessed lovers in thrall; They knelt more to God than they used - that was all: If you praised her as charming, some asked what you

meant,

But the charm of her presence was felt when she

went

My Kate.

The weak and the gentle, the ribald and rude,

She took as she found them, and did them all good;
It always was so with her-see what
you have!
She has made the grass greener even here, with her

grave

My Kate.

My dear one!

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when thou wast alive with the rest, I held thee the sweetest, and loved thee the best; And now thou art dead, shall I not take thy part As thy smiles used to do for thyself, my sweet

Heart

My Kate?

LITERATURE AND LEARNING, IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES II.

BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.

L

ITERATURE which could be carried by the post

bag then formed the greater part of the intellectual nutriment ruminated by the country divines and country justices. The difficulty and expense of conveying large packets, from place to place, were so great, that an extensive work was longer in making its way from Paternoster Row to Devonshire or Lancashire, than it now is in reaching Kentucky. How scantily a rural parsonage was then furnished, even with books the most necessary to a theologian, has already been remarked. The houses of the gentry were not more plentifully supplied. Few knights of the shire had libraries so good as may now perpetually be found in a servant's hall, or in the back parlor of a small shopkeeper. An esquire passed among his neighbours for a great scholar, if Hudibras and Baker's Chronicle, Tarlton's Jests, and the Seven Champions of Christendom, lay in his hall window among the fishing-rods and fowling-pieces. No circulating library, no book society then existed, even in the capital; but in the capital those students who could not afford to purchase largely, had a resource. The

shops of the great booksellers, near St. Paul's Churchyard, were crowded every day, and all day long with readers; and a known customer was often permitted to carry a volume home. In the country there was no such accommodation; and every man was under the necessity of buying whatever he wished to read.

As to the lady of the manor, and her daughters, their literary stores generally consisted of a prayerbook, and a receipt-book. But in truth they lost little by living in rural seclusion. For, even in the highest ranks, and in those situations which afforded the greatest facilities for mental improvement, the English women of that generation were decidedly worse educated than they have been at any other time since the revival of learning. At an earlier period they had studied the masterpieces of ancient genius. In the present day they seldom bestow much attention on the dead languages; but they are familiar with the tongue of Pascal and Molière, with the tongue of Dante and Tasso, with the tongue of Goethe and Schiller; nor is there any purer or more graceful English than that which accomplished women now speak and write. But, during the latter part of the seventeenth century, the culture of the female mind seems to have been almost entirely neglected. If a damsel had the least smattering of literature, she was regarded as a prodigy. Ladies highly born, highly bred, and naturally quick witted, were unable to write a line in their mother tongue, without solecisms and

faults of spelling, such as a charity girl would now be ashamed to commit.

The explanation may easily be found. Extravagant licentiousness, the natural effect of extravagant austerity, was now the mode; and licentiousness had produced its ordinary effect, the moral and intellectual degradation of women. To their personal beauty it was the fashion to pay rude and impudent homage. But the admiration and desire which they inspired were seldom mingled with respect, with affection, or with any chivalrous sentiment. The qualities which fit them to be companions, advisers, confidential friends, rather repelled than attracted the libertines of Whitehall. In such circumstances the standard of female attainments was necessarily low; and it was more dangerous to be above that standard than to be beneath it. Extreme ignorance and frivolity were thought less unbecoming in a lady than the slightest tincture of pedantry. Of the too celebrated women whose faces we still admire on the walls of Hampton Court, few, indeed, were in the habit of reading anything more valuable than acrostics, lampoons, and translations of the Clelia, and the Grand Cyrus.

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The literary acquirements, even of the accomplished gentlemen of that generation, seem to have been somewhat less solid and profound than at an earlier or a later period. Greek learning, at least, did not flourish among us in the days of Charles the Second, as it had

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