Evenings with the Poets. THIRD EVENING. ALL risk of the oft experienced evils of a disputed succession having been removed from the little commonwealth of Derley Manor by the wise decision of Mrs. Howard, which secured to the last holder of the crown and sceptre the selection of a successor, the subjects of King Alfred the Second followed him with smiles and bantering jests, not unmingled with joyous shouts of merriment and delight from the younger members of this body politic, as the whole assembled guests proceeded once more to the Library to witness the abdication of another sovereign, and to welcome his successor to the throne. The looks of bashful eagerness, and youthful glee, mingled with the assumption of an air of indifference among some of the older of his subjects, made even King Alfred smile, as he looked down on the group around him, full as he was with the importance of the last kingly duty devolving upon him, in the choice of a successor. After watching their varied expressions, while he held the holly crown suspended in his hand, till some even of the most staid were forced to yield their grave looks to a blushing smile, King Alfred stept from his throne, and passing through the foremost group, he crowned, as Queen of the evening, Ellen Hepburn, a blushing little maiden who had come all the way from Scotland to meet her cousins at Derley Park. The discrowned monarch conducted his successor, with an air of the most formal gallantry and condescension, to the throne, and dropping on his knee he made obeisance to her, amid the shouts of her applauding subjects. Order being restored after a time, Queen Ellen thus invited the attention of her subjects, during her evening's reign, to the character and genius of Milton, and some other names among later poets of England. The Character and Genius of Miltou. It would be a needless occupation of time to detain you with any lengthened narrative of the history of England's great Christian poet. Unlike the bard of Avon, the name of Milton is associated with no romantic scene of English landscape, as the birth place of the great poet of the commonwealth. His father, a man of ability, and a scrivener by profession, had been disinherited by his parents in consequence of his renouncing the Romish faith, to which they were bigotedly attached. At his house in Bread Street, in the city of London, John Milton was born on the 9th of December 1608. From his earliest years Milton was characterised by docility and the strongest evidences of superior intellect. He proceeded to Christ's Church College, Cambridge, at the age of fifteen, and within the two following years he composed some of those early poems which induced an eminent critic to say of him,-"Milton's writings show him to have been a man from his childhood." After taking his degree of Master of Arts, he returned home and spent some delightful years in study and poetic reverie. From his father he inherited a passionate love of music, which long afterwards solaced him, when shut out for ever by his blindness from free intercourse with the great intellects of past ages. During this happy period Milton composed the mask of Comus, a splendid evidence of poetic genius. It was represented by the Lady Alice Egerton and her brothers, the younger members of the Earl of Bridgewater's family, at Ludlow Castle, on Michaelmas Eve, |