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 104 taste he exhibited. Macaulay, who was seldom disposed to be sentimental, confesses that he wept over Florence Dombey. Lord Byron was strongly moved when Scott recited to him his favorite ballad of Hardyknute; and Sir Walter himself paid the tribute of his tears to Mrs. Opie's dismal stories, and Southey's no less dismal Pilgrimage to Waterloo. When Marmion was first published, Joanna Baillie undertook to read it aloud to a little circle of literary friends, and on reaching those lines which have reference to her own poems,

the "uncontrollable emotion" of her hearers forced the fair reader to break down. In a modern drawing-room this uncontrollable emotion would probably find expression in such gentle murmurs of congratulation as "Very pretty and appropriate, I am sure," or "How awfully nice in Sir Walter to have put it in that way!"

Turn where we will, however, amid the pages of the past, we see this precious gift of tears poured out in what seems to us now a