A FORECAST OF ITALIAN FREEDOM.
[TO THE EDITOR OF TED " SPECTATOR.")
Sra,—The grave has lately closed over Mr. R. Dobie Wilson, whom I knew at Harrow, and who was one of my chief friends at Bailie' and in after life. At Harrow he was captain of the school in the mid " fifties " and gained a prize for a very admirable poem on "Genoa." Mark Pattison said that some men are "dead poets at forty." The odd thing about Wilson was that, though he reached the age of eighty, his reel° vein was well-nigh exhausted at twenty. But I hasten to add that his poem on Genoa, written as it was by a Harrovian and in the metre of " Childe Harold," contained passages which seemed an echo of Byron's masterpiece. One such passage he valued because, some years in advance, it foreshadowed the great work achieved by Garibaldi and Cavour. He especially referred to the four lines which I here quote from memory. In them the boy poet gave utterance to what he
had felt when leaving Italy .
" Farewell, thy loved and lovely shores receding,
In distance .veil their beauty and their woe :
Yet shall thy sons, though trampled now and bleeding, Start from the ground and spurn the prostrate foe."
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