'Now, God be with him! said our king,
Sith 'twill not better bee;
I trust I have within my realm
Five hundred good as hee.'"
Suddenly he flung the book down, and walked hurriedly away. "What folly," he inwardly exclaimed, "is that hope which is at once the cause and the reward of poetry! The author of this brief epic has done all that poet could do: he has given immortality to all that was held precious in his time; its chivalric daring, its true faith, its loyalty; he has duly exalted the supremacy of his native land,—and yet he is forgotten! The song remains, but the memory of the singer has passed away. Who pauses to think in what poverty, in what obscurity, in what wretchedness, the writer of that noble ballad may have wasted a desolate and a disappointed existence? Did he die young, poisoned by the first draught of life and its sorrows? or did he drag on a weary old age, whose hope had long since perished? Who knows? and, alas! who cares? We take our pleasure, and we think not of gratitude. Out upon the accursed and selfish race to which I belong! Even so have I laboured, and even so shall I be rewarded. Fool that I have been! to toil hour after hour in giving others—what?—an hour's gratification, which they will take thanklessly, and even reproachfully, full of their own petty cavillings and distastes. The peasant boy, who followed the coloured track of the rainbow, hoping to find the blue and charmed
