an aristocratic liberal; that is, a man who assumes to be above the people rather than of them; who would not the less scorn to add a feather to their weights in running the race of life; but who, at the same time, has an amiable contempt for the servility, treachery, and dishonesty which are more than likely to be qualities inherent in poverty, whether handicapped or not by ignorance or servile origin. And in any event, ex officio every poet should be something of a tory.

For the same reason, a poet should, for his profession's sake, belong to the more archaic church. The ceilings of the wouldbe philosophical temple of Protestantism have too white-washed and forbidding a look to invite the muses to kneel therein. But we have no right to expect that a man born in an English rectory should escape the prejudices which are the lares haunting its hearthstones. To me, Queen Mary, whether regarded as a poem or a drama, is a very uncomfortable production. There is an aura of chilliness running through the entire subject. There is but one cheery moment or word to rest upon; and that is where "Robin came and kissed me milking the cow."

Wives who suffer as did Mary are by no means uncommon; and in a social point of view, to say the least of it, it was rather ungallant of the Laureate, in his eagerness to strike a blow for his island's church, to hit out at a poor, visionary old maid making a loveless and fruitless marriage. Whenever rubicund and wheezy Anglican ecclesiasticism feels, as punishment for its good living, an extra twinge of rheumatic gout in its joints, it has frightful visions of the Armada and the Spanish Inquisition; and groans about thumb-screws and racks.

"The Cup," as a drama, has, I believe, had more stage success than either Harold or Mary, and has bits here and there in the poet's happiest manner. The incident is taken from Plutarch's "Amatoria" (repeated in Polyænus). I remember seeing it made into a story with a French mise en scène, pub

lished in "Friendship's Offering" for 1839, an annual to preceding years of which Tennyson had contributed. The subject appears also to have been selected by Jean de Hays, a French dramatist, at the close of the sixteenth century, for his "Cammate."

As each of Tennyson's plays has been produced on the stage, there has been a buzzing sub-murmur of critics that there was only a succès d'estime, if not an absolute failure. Had there been an out-and-out failure, it would only have been what might have been expected. The poet is not versed in stage business, as is Boucicault, and such knowledge is absolutely essential to the composition, nowadays, of a successful drama. Had the rectory lad improved his time properly from, say, 1830 to 1840, in lounging in the green-rooms and posing in the side-scenes, jostling scene shifters and shawling soubrettes, and taking thespian parties to supper orgies, instead of sitting priggishly in his darling room and posing as Miss Alfred, his training would now stand him in good service.

But a day may come when the public familiar with the text of his plays will enjoy them on representation. Be it remembered that "The Cid" had detractors whose opinions were weighty; and that Molière's wittiest lines took time to impress.

The telegraph tells us that Tennyson's prose drama, "The Promise of May," is a failure; and also that the Most Noble the Marquess of Queensberry arose and protested against the travesty in the play of the modern dogmas concerning free thought, and left the house. One is carried back to the days of Louis Quatorze, and to the noble cavaliers who then crowded the stage. What the deuce has a noble marquess to do with free thought, anyway? A coronet is about as handy a thing to have on in a revolution in politics or religion as a stovepipe hat in an Irish shindy. How much more appreciative a critic would Her Grace Kitty of the ducal Queensberrys have been -Prior's Kitty-Gay's Kitty-who stood stoutly up for "The Beggar's Opera," and nursed the sick poet in his disgrace when

royalty itself turned censor-Walpole's Kitty -could she have sat in a box and patted her pretty hands!

Tennyson's fame has brought him one frightful infliction, in the persistent intrusion upon his time and acquaintance of lionhunting tourists; and it is even murmured that there is a class of traveling Americans especially guilty in that way.

Hawthorne set Americans an example in that regard which should have been accepted. Now, if there was an American who would have represented our nation gracefully in the poet's eyes, it would have been Hawthorne; if any American could have been sure of a welcome, it was Hawthorne; and yet he contented himself with a good look at the Englishman in a public assembly. There might be a remedy for the evil, pacifying all parties. The poet might select a tall young man from the rising generation-some Maudle or Postlethwaite-who would not cloy with being stared at (and there are young bards to whom notoriety is so sweet!) to play the part of the veteran's double, and be shown as the actual incumbent of the laureateship. Of course, the shadow would have to prune his diction so as not to ruin Tennyson's reputation; but such discipline might be a great benefit in years to come.

Tennyson has, as a fact, founded no school. His grammatical tricks, his fashions of prosody, his shades of mannerism, have all been imitated, for all had the seed; but the revolution in science, over the infancy of which Tennyson has been a watchful sentinel, and the broadening of the field of culture, the new aims which are to be sought, and the new foes which are to be vanquished, render it necessary that "the foremost files of time," in which Tennyson has so long served as a grenadier, be filled up with young recuits armed with new weapons; and that the veterans who survive be left to do simple garrison duty over the spoils already captured.

Tennyson has lived a brilliant and complete literary life. We hope he may be

spared to us as long as was Fontenelle to the Frenchmen; that he will see an international copyright in smooth working order; that he will make a fortune out of his books, every stanza bringing him a one-carat diamond; and that he will be peremptorily summoned to the House of Lords before "that venerable bulwark" is smashed to flinders by the artillery of "Free Thought." What a pang strikes the hearts of us—

"With tonsured heads in middle age forlorn ". when a master of our day passes away! How many are there of us who have read a fresh novel with any intensity since Thackeray fell asleep? People of the glaring, impertinent generation coming in and treading on our kibes may have their new fiction, new poems, and new philosophy; but we will none of them.

The generation which commenced "when classic Canning died" is closing; the men who amused and instructed it are, with some few exceptions, gone. Macaulay, Thackeray, Dickens, Longfellow, Dr. Newman, Carlyle, Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, are dead. If a few like Manning, Gladstone, and Tennyson still remain with us, "yet is their strength labor and sorrow."

There is no easy transition or succession from one generation to another. There is always a moral chasm intervening. The coming race may admire Tennyson; but he will not be their representative poet. His prides, his sympathies, his affections, his politics, his beliefs, will be archaisms to their taste.

There are poets, possessors of some power and authority in our reading world, who may reign after him; but it will be as a new dynasty, and not by regular succession.

It will be a bad index of the morality of the next age if the band of "fleshly" bards who have already glided into popularity maintain their ground permanently. They are as foreign to the Laureate in temperament and morals as were the authors of the days of Charles II. to Milton. The clef to which the Laureate has at all times set his notes has been one of honest morality or honest remorse. He has sung either the

miseries that attend as sequences to impossible or disappointed love in self-reverencing natures, or the happiness which honestly comes from gratification; but he has not dallied over description of the actual phenomenon of passion. Love is present in all his verses; but it is hidden under the soil, like the dead man's head in the Pot of Basil. It is the force behind the emotionnot the ultimate object to be reached. But with the school I speak of, the delirium is the normal state of the pulse; and poetry is held to be merely one long gloating chant of tyrannic and gnashing sensuality, that suggests the turgid visions of an insane retreat, and the propriety of prompt exhibition of a strong dose of bromide to the fevered or epileptic versifier.

What Tennyson thinks of that sort of poetico-sexual Katzenjammer may be gathered from the fact that he makes Lucretius speed his departure out of life when he discovers, or fancies that he discovers, what a degraded phenomenon it is, under given conditions.

I have suggested that Tennyson closes a poetic generation. He has been in sympathy with every great poet, from Dante downward. He is, as it were, the end of the Renaissance. After all, there is only a difference of degree, of intensity of knowledge, between, say, Petrarch, Erasmus, Bentley, Dr. Johnson, Porson, and Dr. Arnold. All belong to the same order of thought, used the same materials—that is to say, they rescued the fragments of Greek civilization and letters, and worked them into western culture. Those materials, so far as the workmen are concerned, are exhausted. There is little or nothing of them that is not being manipulated at third or fourth hands. There must be details told off to go out into the forests, like Homer's Achaians, for new timber. The precious metals of the Greek

VOL. I.-3.

revival of letters have been all melted down and thoroughly mixed. The old plate of Asiatic thought must now go into the pot.

Tennyson felt the need of being in full sympathy with the scholarship of his day, and attained it. But the new poet, the possible worthy successor of Tennyson, must not rest with Virgil and Theocritus, Dante and Shakspere, as his masters and guides. He must go back to the cradle of the world, peradventure, to find there, not models, but mysterious metaphysical forces, wherewith to vivify his verse. This new poet, whoever he be, this Iopas to come after the Phemius of Her Majesty Victoria's court, must, in any event, as part of his poetic task, learn to clothe the present aridity of science in graceful garb. He must be a Lucretius to the Memmii of the next race.

How he will work, what elements he will employ, what emotions invoke, we of this age cannot declare, any more than Coleridge could have foretold the success and glory of Tennyson.

NOTE. Now that Mr. Fletcher and his collaborateurs have published a new edition of Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, there is no longer any necessity of referring the reader to magazine articles. Some of them have a merit apart from the subject. Notably, the article by "D. R.," a Lincolnshire Rector (Macmillan's, 1874), said to be the Rev. Drummond Rawnsley, a connection of both the Tennyson and Franklin families, and a poet himself. It may be proper to call the reader's attention to the letters by the first Lady Franklin, who died in 1825, to Miss Mitford, both before her marriage to the great sailor and afterwards, as evidence of the cultured character of those Lincolnshire villages.

The only books that it is necessary here to refer readers to (more for the sake of acknowledging my obligation to them than anything else) are "Alfred Tennyson, his Life and Works," by Walter E. Wace, Edinburgh, 1881; and "Tennysoniana," by R. H. Shepherd, 2nd edition, 1879. To those who wish to

gain some idea of the bibliography of our poet, both or either of the volumes will render a satisfactory service.

T. H. Rearden.

THE Hon. J. P. Benjamin, in a lecture delivered in San Francisco twenty-two years ago, took for his subject the differences between the constitution of the United States as it was intended by its framers, and the same constitution as it had come, in the course of seventy years, to be administered. He adverted first to the provisions in relation to the election of president, and pointed out the changes that had taken place in the practical operation of those provisions as compared with the theory of the delegates to the convention who drew and adopted them. Their idea, in providing for presidential electors, had been to select wise and prudent men, who, after consultation, should choose some eminent citizen most worthy to fill the exalted office of chief magistrate; but in practice, presidential electors had become mere passive instruments for recording the popular vote. The president had come to be elected as directly by the people as if his name were printed on every ballot thrown by the winning party on election day. Instead of what had been fondly supposed to present the most perfect scheme devised by the wit of man for insuring the best choice of a chief magistrate for a free people, the whole business of presidentmaking had fallen into the hands of scheming politicians and the vile machinery of party conventions.

He next turned his attention to the changes in the functions of the senate, as contemplated by the framers of the constitution, and its functions in practical operation. It had been intended that the senate should advise and counsel with the president in all important executive concerns; and for this reason, for the first few years, it sat with closed doors like a council of state, and the president frequently appeared in person and consulted with it in reference to governmental affairs: and on the other hand the secretaries of departments

attended in person to give verbal explanations about matters on which the senate required information. That body, during those early days, afforded no field for the public display of forensic ability, no vantageground for ambition; and so marked was this seclusion from the public eye that aspiring men preferred the house of representatives, where they found an opportunity of putting themselves prominently before the people. But all this had completely changed. The house of representatives had become so numerous and its business had come to be managed in so formal a manner that such a thing as real debate was rarely ever witnessed in its hall; while on the other hand the senate had lost its original advisory functions and become the debating branch of the national congress, the chosen arena for ambitious aspiration.

And so the lecturer went on, pointing out numerous changes that had taken place. He spoke of the wide divergence from the principles and purposes of the founders of the government in relation to appointments to office, and gave it as his deliberate conviction that the indiscriminate removal of all subordinate incumbents on every change of administration, for the mere purpose of rewarding political adherents for partisan services, was in the last degree subversive of political morality; and he pronounced the practice of making such indiscriminate removals, that had grown up, one of the most lamentable perversions of the constitution as it was intended and adopted, fraught with infinite mischief, reaching much farther than appeared upon the surface: and said that the statesman who should devise an efficient remedy for the evil would confer an inestimable benefit on his country. He also spoke of the unconstitutional exercise of power by President Jefferson in the purchase of Louisiana, the pernicious example thus set for the acquisition of territory in modes