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 semblance of gratification, and for the remaining hours his spirit was at peace. But it does seem a hard return to exact for hospitality, and must often have suggested to men of letters the felicity of staying at home.

Miss Seward made it her happy boast that the number and the warmth of Mr. Hayley's tributes—inserted duly in her album—raised her to a rivalry with Swift's Stella, or Prior's Chloe. "Our four years' correspondence has been enriched with a galaxy of little poetic gems of the first water." Nor was the lady backward in returning compliment for compliment. That barter of praise, that exchange of felicitation, which is both so polite and so profitable, was as well understood by our sentimental ancestors as it is in this hard-headed age. Indeed, I am not sure that the Muse did not sometimes calculate more closely then than she ventures to do to-day. We know that Canon Seward wrote an elegiac poem on a young nobleman who was held to be dying, but who—perversely enough—recovered; whereupon the reverend eulogist changed the name, and transferred his heartfelt lamentations to another