For each his food and water draws

From wood and fountain, where Wholesome and pure and safe it was Furnished by Heaven's own care; And all is bright and blest, because Freedom and health are there!

"I merit punishment, I own;

I erred, I must confess it; yet
The fault was in the tongue alone,
The heart is true. Forgive! Forget!

I beg for mercy, and my woes

May claim with pity to be heard; If to my prayers your ears you close,

Where can I hope for one kind word
In my extremity of ill?

And if the pang of hope deferred
Arise from discord in your will,
For me must be revived again
The fate of Metius and the pain.

"I pray you, then; renew for me

The charm that made you doubly fair, In sweet and virtuous harmony

Urging, resistlessly, my prayer;

With him for whose loved sake, I swear,

I more lament my fault than pains,
Strange and unheard of as they are."

His

The artist, Ferdinand Barth, who has painted our picture of Tasso, is a German, and was a pupil of the famous Piloty. most noted picture is one depicting the casket scene from "The Merchant of Venice," but his "Paganini in Prison" is also a work worthy of regard.

CHAUCER.

JOHN OF GAUNT, the fourth son of Edward the Third and the good Queen Philippa of Hainault, was the firm friend and patron of two great Englishmen, John Wyclif, the first translator of the Bible into English, and Geoffrey Chaucer, "the morning star of English poetry." John, called of "Gaunt because he was born at Ghent, in Flanders, which the common people so pronounced, married Blanche, daughter of the Duke of Lancaster, through whom that title later came to John. At her decease, Chaucer

wrote his poem on "The Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse." John of Gaunt's second matrimonial alliance was with Constance, a princess of Spain, after whose death he espoused Catherine Swynford, the sister of Chaucer's wife, who was one of the ladiesin-waiting of Queen Philippa, was named Philippa, and was, probably, herself a native of Hainault.

Chaucer held office of one kind or another under three kings, Edward III., Richard II., and Henry IV., and was several times sent abroad on diplomatic missions. On one of these occasions he spent some time in Italy, and is thought to have met Petrarch.

Ford Madox Brown, a Pre-Raphaelite painter, though never actually a member of the famous Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and an artist too little known in the United States, sent to the Royal Academy, in 1851, a painting which he named "Chaucer at the Court of Edward III."

This remarkable work was purchased a number of years later for the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, at Sydney, where it now hangs, and recalls to the Colonial or the visitor from England's shore two of her ancient glories - a brightening one of letters and a fading one of arms -in its presentment of Chaucer and of the Black Prince.

Our description of the picture is based upon the painter's own words in the catalogue of his pictures exhibited in London in 1865. The poet is supposed to be reading these lines from the "Legend of Custance," told by the man of law in the "Canterbury Tales:

"Hire litel child lay weping on hire arm,

And kneling pitously to him she said,

Pees, litel sone, I wol do thee no harm.

With that hire coverchief of hire hed she braid
And over his litel eyen she it laid,

And in hire arme she lulleth it ful fast,

And unto the heven hire eyen up she cast."