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1844.] accent in the word lament is at variance with the plainest proprieties of the English tongue. The "earth-spirits" deliver themselves thus:—

Earth Spirits.

First Spirit.

Second Spirit.

In one of the lyrical effusions, man is informed that when he goes to heaven—

" Then a sough of glory

Shall your entrance greet,

Ruffling round the doorway

The smooth radiance it shall meet."

We wonder what meaning Miss Barrett attaches to the word sough! It is a term expressive of the dreary sighing of autumnal winds, or any sound still more disconsolate and dreary and therefore, to talk of a "sough of glory," is to talk neither more nor less than absolute nonsense.

What can be more unlyrical than this verse?

"Live, work on, oh, Earthy!

By the Actual's tension

Speed the arrow worthy

Of a pure ascension."

We have said that the lyrical effusions interspersed throughout the "Drama of Exile," are very slovenly and defective in point of rhyme. What can be worse than "Godhead" and "wooded,"' "treading" and "Eden," "glories" and "floorwise," "calmly" and "palm-tree," "atoms" and "fathoms," "accompted" and "trumpet," and a hundred others? What can be worse, do we ask? We answer that there is one species of rhyme which Miss Barrett is sometimes, though we are happy to say, very rarely, guilty of, which is infinitely more reprehensible than any of these inaccuracies. We allude to the practice of affixing an r to the end of certain words, in order to make them rhyme with other words which terminate in that letter. Writers who are guilty of this atrocity are not merely to be condemned as bad rhymester they are to be blamed on the far more serious ground that they give the sanction and authority of print to one of the vilest vulgarisms which pollutes the oral language of certain provincial societies. What makes the practice so offensive in literary composition is the fact, that the barbarism is one which may sometimes be actually heard falling from living lips. But for this, it would be pardonable. We verily believe that Miss Barrett herself does not talk of "Laurar" and "Matildar" we verily believe that she would consider any one who does so no fit associate for herself in point of manners or education:—yet she scruples not to make "Aceldama" (r) rhyme to "tamer," and "Onora"(r) rhyme to "o'er her." When we think of these things,