May he with terror at last see his error, And Newman hide his face ; And may all those hot prelates who're acting like zealots Go to their resting-place. May 'Gloucester and Bristol' be saved from the pistol, For speaking and preaching, at Puseyite teaching Oh may no backbiters revile at those mitres Which Palmerston has bestowed For he couldn't have done better than snap the fetter Of learning, which stood in the road. And at last may Spurgeon, the juvenile surgeon Of souls, get a mitre too; And preach and thunder, to Pusey's wonder, As only he can do." The guests were sighing and some were crying But the door-bell is ringing, and some are beginning And others are standing upstairs on the landing, The last at the Party was Mrs. M'Carty, What else but vanity or worse profanity Came of that happy day? καρηκομόων. THE NEW RUGBEIAN. No. IX. SEPTEMBER, 1859. THE IDYLLS OF THE KING. MR. TENNYSON has attempted a subject, for which all Englishmen ought to be indebted to him; he has reproduced our legends; he has shewn us that the glens of Astolat, the meadows of Camelot, can tell us as pretty, nay prettier stories of their own, than the Black Forest or the romantic caves of Arabia. Whether men choose to ascribe it to the beauty of the subject, or our poet's manner of treating it, he has quite cleared himself of the imputation, somewhat deservedly cast upon him, of not being able to write continuous pieces. It is true we can hardly call the whole volume a continuous piece, for, as its title declares, it is divided into four Idylls. But, though the narratives in the three first are entirely distinct from one another yet, just as a Janus may be supported by three pillars, so the fourth and concluding Idyll unites the three first, and completes the harmony of the whole. Enid's sorrows, Vivien's inconstancy, and Elaine's hopelessness of love, all these are traceable to a common cause, and all would be told insufficiently without the fate of that cause. This cause is Guinevere. Her history, as N N gathered from the first three Idylls, is briefly this. Married to Arthur, a prince truly sans peur et sans reproche, and one who imagined all others to be the same; she was still discontented with her married life. To use her own words: "to me He is all fault who hath no fault at all; For who loves me must have some touch of earth, The low sun makes the colour." For this reason she had chosen Lancelot, the bravest and most courteous of her knights, and bound him to her service by ties so close, that "His honour rooted in dishonour stood, And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." This becoming the scandal of the court, and Geraint, one of Arthur's knights, fearing lest his wife Enid's friendship for Guinevere had led her equally astray, passes her through various ordeals to prove her. These and her triumphant exculpation form the subject of the first Idyll. In the second we have à different character in the queen's other friend to deal with. Taking advantage of the license in the court Vivien gives full play to her own wickedness, and is the cause of the ruin of Merlin, the magician of the court, whom she leaves at last, as her ambition was "Both lost to life and use and name and fame." This is the least touching of the three narratives; the character of Vivien is overdrawn, and the poem does but shock, where it is meant to impress the reader. The third Idyll forms a pleasing contrast to the preceding one : Elaine, the hopeless and unsuspecting rival of her Queen, falls a victim to her innocent passion, and her death is one of the most touching passages in the whole book. But Guinevere's bad example begins now to work greater misfortunes than mere individual sufferings. Her guilt is discovered by Modred, the bitter enemy of Lancelot. They fly, not daring to await the issue, she to a convent, and Lancelot to his castle to defend himself against the now awakened king. The empire is broken up. The traitor Modred, "like a subtle beast ever ready to spring," takes advantage of the quarrel to usurp the throne, and Guinevere who in the still of the convent had had time to reflect on the ruin she had worked to the kingdom, too late repentant was ready to give way to despair. The curtain falls over the last meeting between the injured husband and repentant wife. Arthur, firm in his self-possession, yet with deepest grief, bids her farewell, and though telling her of the curse she had brought on the nation, forbears to curse her as the cause of it, assures her of his unchangeable love, and that though, by her own crime, lost to him for ever on earth, they yet might meet in heaven. Such is a brief sketch of the narrative of the poem. For simplicity of style, and delineation of character, we have not seen its superior. We feel in this, that we are dealing with less chivalrous and more natural heroes than in Spenser; we see the two extremes fairly depicted in Geraint and Arthur, in Vivien and Elaine; Vivien, who "had. she found a dagger would have stabbed Merlin," for not returning her pretended love, and Elaine who meekly replied to her brothers, "It is no more Sir Launcelot's fault, Then again what hidden Socratean depth we find in the lines "No greatness, save it be some far off touch What moral worth in "Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great," What power of description in "the world All ear and eye with such a stupid heart, To interpret ear and eye and such a tongue Mr. Tennyson's similes are exquisite : here is one, which reminds one forcibly of Vandyke's Charles I. "As when a painter poring on a face Divinely through all hindrance finds the man And fullest, so the face before her lived." Here is another equally natural— "There her voice brake suddenly, Then as a stream that spouting from a cliff, The description of Arthur's throne, as indeed many other passages in the volume, is quite Homeric, and as if still something was wanting to a genius which so unites power |