_"Her brow was fair"_ (Vol. ii p. 407.).--The author of the passage quoted
by J.M.B. is Barry Cornwall. It occurs in one of the delicious {451} little
"Miscellaneous Poems" attached to the volume entitled _Dramatic Scenes_.
The quotation is not quite accurate, the last two words of the first line,
"and look'd," being carried into the second, and thus destroying the metre
of both. The Dr. Armstrong alluded to by J.M.B. is, I suppose, a modern
celebrity of whom I must plead guilty of being ignorant. The lines could,
of course, only occur in the writings of the Dr. Armstrong who wrote _The
Art of Preserving Health_, and who was the friend of the poet Thomson,
through the interpolation of some modern editor, within the last thirty
years. Barry Cornwall's poems have never been collected, in this country at
least; and as the volume which contains the one in question is to be met
with only occasionally, on the book stalls, I send you the entire poem:--