ing to be exact, he refers for his authority to page 652 of Sylvester's works, and then proceeds to print a poem as his which is not there. Had he read the page he quotes so carefully, he would have seen that "The Lie" and "The Soul's Errand" were two separate productions, alike only in the six stanzas taken from the former and included in the latter.

We learn that Sir Walter Raleigh's poems were never all collected into a volume, and, further, we learn that "The Lie," as a separate piece, was attributed to him at an early period. Payne Collier, as I have said, prints it as his, from a manuscript "of the time"; and in an elaborate article on Raleigh, in the North British Review, copied into Littell's Living Age, of June 9, 1855, the able reviewer refers particularly to "The Lie," "saddest of poems," as Sir Walter's, and adds in a note that "it is to be found in a manuscript of 1595." This would make the piece two hundred and seventy years old. When and by whom it was first taken from Sir Walter and given to Sylvester, with the altered title, and why Sylvester incorporated into his poem of "The Soul's Errand” six stanzas belonging to "The Lie," can now, of course, never be known.

I find that I have been indulging in quite a flow of words about a few old verses; but then they are verses, and such as one should not be robbed of. They have lived through centuries of time, and outlived generations of ambitious penmen, and the true name of the author ought to live with them. Long ago, when a school-boy, I used to read and repeat "The Lie," and it was then the undoubted work of Sir Walter Raleigh. In after years, on looking into various volumes of old English poetry, I was told that "The Lie" was not "The Lie," and was not written by Sir Walter Raleigh; that the true title of the piece was "The Soul's Errand," and that the real author of it was a certain Joshua Sylvester. Unwilling to displace the brave knight from the niche he had graced so long,

I hunted up Sylvester's old folio, and the result of my search may be found in these imperfect remarks.

Frankly, I would fain believe that "The Lie" was written by Sir Walter. It is true I am not able to prove it, but I think I prove that it was not written by Sylvester. He wrote another poem, "The Soul's Errand," and he is welcome to it; that is, he is welcome to fourteen of its twenty stanzas, - the other six do not belong to him. Give him also, painstaking man! due laudation for his version of the "Divine Du Bartas," of which formidable work any one who has the courage to grapple with its six hundred and fifty-odd folio pages may know where to find

COMI

OMING up from one of the Brooklyn ferries, after dark, on a sultry summer evening, I take my way through the close-built district of New York City still known as "The Swamp." The narrow streets of the place are deserted by this time, but they have been lively enough during the day with the busy leather-dealers and their teams; for this is the great hide and leather mart of the city, as any one might guess even now in the gloom by the pungent odors that arise on every side. The heavy iron doors and window-shutters of the buildings have been locked and barred for the night; and the thick atmosphere of the place appears to affect the gaslights, which burn sickly and dim in the street lanterns. Nobody lives here at night. The footfalls of the solitary

policeman give out a hollow sound as he paces the narrow trottoir of Ferry Street, in the heart of "The Swamp." Over two hundred years ago, when Governor Peter Stuyvesant pastured his flocks and herds hereabouts, the wayfarer would have been more likely to mark a solitary heron than a solitary policeman; for it was really a swamp then, and much earthwork must have been expended in making the solid ground whereon the buildings now stand. Neither is it probable that, even on the most sultry of summer nights, the nose of old Mynheer Stuyvesant would have been saluted with odors of morocco leather, such as fill the air of "The Swamp" to-night. The wild swamp-flowers, though, gave out some faint perfumes to the night

air in those olden times; but the place could hardly have been so still of a summer night as it is now, for the booming of the bullfrog and the piping of his lesser kin must have made night resonant here, and it is reasonable to surmise that owls hooted in the cedar-trees that hung over the tawny sedges of the swamp. "Jack-o'-Lantern" was the only inhabitant who burned gas hereabouts in those times, and he manufactured his own. The nocturnal raccoon edged his way through the alders here, in the old summer nights, and the muskrat built his house among the reeds. Not a raccoon nor a muskrat is the wayfarer likely to meet with here to-night; but the gray rat of civilization is to be dimly discerned, as he lopes along the gutters in his nightly prowl.

There is something very bewildering to the untutored mind in the announcements on the dim, stony door-posts of the stores. Here it is set forth that "Kids and Gorings" are the staple of the concern. Puzzling though the inscription is to me, yet I recognize in it something that is pastoral and significant; for there were kids that skipped, probably, and bulls that gored, when the grass was green here. "Oak and Hemlock Leather," on the next doorpost, reads well, for it is redolent of glades that were old before the masonry that now prevails here had been dreamed of. Here we have an announcement of "Russet Roans”; and the next merchant, who is apparently a cannibal or a ghoul, deliberately notifies the public that he deals in “Hatters' Skins." Many of the door-posts announce "Findings" and "Skivers"; and upon one of them I note the somewhat remarkable intimation of "Pulled Wool." Gold Street, also, is redolent of all these things, as I turn into it, nor is there any remission of the pungent trade-stenches of the district until I have gained a good distance up Spruce Street, toward the City Hall Park. Here the Bowery proper, viewed as a great artery of New York trade and travel, may be said to begin. The first

reach of it is called Chatham Street; and, having plunged into this, I have nothing before me now but Bowery for a distance of nearly two miles.

Leaving behind me, then, the twinkling lights of the newspaper buildings and those of the City Hall Park, northward along Chatham Street I bend my loitering steps. Israel predominates here, — Israel, with its traditional stock in trade of cheap clothing, and bawbles that are made to wear, but not to wear long. The shops here are mostly small, and quite open to the street in front, which gives the place a bazaar-like appearance in summer. Economy in space is practised to the utmost. It is curious to observe how closely crowded the goods (bads might be a more appropriate term for most of them) are outside the shops, as well as inside. The fronts of the houses are festooned with raiment of all kinds, until they look like tents made of variegated dry-goods. Here is a stall so confined that the occupant, rocking in his chair near the farther end of it, stretches his slippered feet well out upon the threshold. It is near closing time now, and many of the dealers, with their wives and children, are sitting out in front of their shops, and, if not under their own vines and fig-trees, at least under their own gaudy flannels and "loud - patterned" cotton goods, which are waving overhead in the sluggish evening breeze. Nothing can be more suggestive of lazily industrious Jewry than this short, thick-set clothier, with the curved nose, and spiral, oily hair, who sits out on the sidewalk and blows clouds from his meerschaum pipe. The women who lounge here are generally stoutish and slatternly, with few clothes on, but plenty of frowzy hair. Here and there one may see a pretty face among the younger girls; and it is sad to reflect that these little Hebrew maids will become stout and slatternly by and by, and have hooked noses like their mothers, and double chins. The labels on the ready-made clothing are curious in their way. Here a pair of trousers in glaring brown and yellow

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stripes is ticketed with the alluring word, "Lovely." Other garments are offered to the public, with such guaranties as "Original," Genteel," Excelsior," and "Our Own." There is not an article among them but has its ticket of recommendation, and another card affixed to each sets forth the lowest price for which it is to be had. The number and variety of hats on show along this queer arcade are very characteristic of the people, with whom hats have long been a traditional article of commerce. Dimly-lighted cellars, down precipitous flights of narrow, dirty steps, up which come fumes of coffee and cooked viands, are to be seen at short intervals, and these restaurants are supported mainly by the denizens of the street. Shops in the windows of which blazes much cheap jewelry abound, and there are also many tobacconists on a small

scale.

The lights of Chatham Square twinkle out now; and here I pause before a feature very peculiar to the Bowery,

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- one of those large, open shops in which vociferous salesmen address from galleries a motley crowd of men and women. One fellow in dirty shirtsleeves and a Turkish cap flourishes aloft something which looks like a fan, but proves, on closer inspection, to be a group composed of several pocketcombs, a razor, and other small articles, constituting in all a "lot." This he offers, with stentorian utterances, for a price a hundred per cent less, you bet, than you kin buy 'em for on Broadway." Other salesmen lean furiously over the gallery railing, flourishing shirts, stockings, and garments of every kind, mentionable and unmentionable, in the faces of the gaping loafers below. Sometimes a particular "lot" will attract the attention of a spectator, and he will chaffer about it for a while; but the sales do not often appear to be very brisk. The people one sees in these places are very characteristic of the Bowery. Many of them are what the police call "hard cases," men, with coarse, bulldog features, their mustaches trimmed

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very close, and dyed with something that gives them a foxy-black hue. Women, many of them with children in their arms, have come to look out for bargains. Near the entrance, which is quite open to the street, there stands a man with a light cane in his hand, which he lays every now and then over the shoulders of some objectionable youth marked by him in the crowd. The objectionable youth is a pickpocket, or a "sneak-thief," or both, and the man with the cane is the private detective attached to the place. He is well acquainted with the regular thieves of these localities, and his business is to "spot" them, and keep them from edging in among the loose articles lying about the store. He says that there are a great many notorious pickpockets in the crowd, and he looks like one who knows.

Here and there along the Bowery small, shrivelled Chinamen stand by rickety tables, on which a few boxes of cheap cigars are exposed for sale. These foreigners look uneasy in their Bowery clothes, which are of the cheapest quality sold at the places just mentioned. Some of them wear the traditional queue, but they wind it very closely round their heads, probably to avoid the derision of the street boys, to whom a Chinaman's "tail" offers a temptation not to be resisted. Others have allowed their hair to grow in the ordinary manner. They are not communicative when addressed, which may be due, perhaps, to the fact, that but few of them possess more of the English language than is necessary for the purposes of trade. Fireworks and tobacco are the principal articles in which these New York Chinamen deal.

Everybody who passes through the Bowery, and more especially at night, must have observed the remarkable prevalence of small children there. Swarms of well-clad little boys and girls, belonging to the shop-keepers, sport before the doors until a late hour at night. Here is a group of extremely diminutive ones, dancing an elf-like measure to the music of an itin