healthful tone of his poetry.

No critic has ever

been able to allege, with the smallest semblance of truth, that his works have had anything but a wholesome effect. A little anecdote, told by Mrs. Ritchie, is worth repeating, if only as a set-off against the puerile protest of the Good Templars. One day, when walking in Covent Garden, he was stopped by a rough-looking man, who held out his hand and said, "You're Mr. Tennyson. Look here, sir, here am I. I've been drunk for six days out of the seven, but if you will shake me by the hand, I'm d-d if ever I get drunk again."

R

CHAPTER X.

IN November, 1882, a fourth drama by Tennyson was acted upon the stage. This time it was a prose work, founded on domestic incidents, and called "The Promise of May." It saw the light at the Globe Theatre, then under the management of Mrs. Bernard Beere, and the wags, with that questionable kind of wit which measures its feebleness by punning on names, said that whereas the Laureates of old wrote for wine, the present Laureate had set the example of writing "for Beere." The critics were tolerably unanimous in condemning the new play, which had the signal demerit of being outside their conception of orthodox dramatic requirements. No doubt it was "caviare to the general"-critics included. But the play, whatever its shortcomings on the score of unusualness, was, in the opinion of men

capable of judging calmly of things new to their experience, a remarkable work of elaborate and skilful characterization. The chief character, Edgar, is a young English artist of good birth and fortune, who has a habit of examining the foundations of moral doctrines, and of weighing old-fashioned notions of patriotism in the conceptions of Universal Brotherhood. Ethical speculation has led to a soulless epicureanism

-a Utilitarianism without its sanctions. Metaphysical doubts have, in like manner, landed him in rank materialism; while, in his new-fangled contempt for the old beliefs, he talks of the approaching great democratic deluge," of the futility of the marriage tie, of the superfluousness of parental care and affection, since marriage is soon to be abolished and children reared by the State. This incarnation of the restless spirit of the age is launched in a quiet Lincolnshire village, far away from railways; where the well-to-do Farmer Steer, if he cannot read or write, can boast that he has, by dint of his own savings, become a yeoman like his forefathers; and where his honest but less substantial neighbour, Farmer

Dobson, declares that he hates books because they "puts folks off the old ways," and is ready with a homely refutation of Communistic doctrines by supposing that he had "cut up his pig and divided it among the whole parish," in which case, as he remarks, "there would not be a dinner for any one, and I should have lost my pig." Edgar comes as a destroying serpent in this garden of innocence. On the ground that he has come to regard man as "a willy-nilly bundle of sensations," he wins the love of Farmer Steer's pretty daughter Eva-and then betrays and abandons her, with a cool acknowledgment that they had been "very happy together, and possibly they might meet again." Edgar, years after, returns to the neighbourhood, and endeavours to persuade the simple folk that he is not himself, by producing what purports to be an obituary notice of his death, but is, in fact, an announcement of the death of his father. In this he so far succeeds as to be accepted as a suitor by Dora Steer (a sister of the betrayed and deserted Eva), whom he proposes to himself to marry to "make amends" for his former conduct. Dora consents to become his wife,

but his matrimonial penance is frustrated by the re-appearance of his first victim, who drops dead with the excitement of the interview; whereupon Dora, respecting her sister's dying expressions of forgiveness, directs her old faithful, but hitherto despised admirer, Farmer Dobson, to conduct Edgar out of the farm, "over the last stile, beyond the last field," but to do him no violence.

It is necessary to give this brief abstract of the play; but it is even more necessary to give the analysis of the chief character which appeared, during the subsequent controversy, in one of the morning journals. "Edgar is not," says the writer, "as the critics will have it, a freethinker, drawn into crime by his Communistic theories; Edgar is not a protest against the atheism of the age; Edgar is not even an honest Radical nor a sincere follower of Schopenhauer; he is nothing thorough and nothing sincere; but he is a criminal, and at the same time a gentleman. These are the two sides to his character. He has no conscience until he is brought face to face with the consequences of his crime, and in the awaken