Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/79

Rh A Timon you! Nay, nay, for shame:
 * It looks too arrogant a jest—

The fierce old man—to take his name
 * You bandbox. Off, and let him rest.

The best known and longest lived of the old-fashioned annuals was the Keepsake, edited for many years by the Countess of Blessington, and still to-day retaining the tag-rags of a reputation in the second-hand-book sellers' catalogues. In 1851 its noble editress handed it over to her niece, Miss Marguerite Power, on whose behalf an effort was made by the "Gore House set" to beat up a strong list of contributors. Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton contributed, and Tennyson sent two poems, the well-known "Come not when I am dead" and the following nine lines never since reprinted:

The one-time powerful Examiner has been dead for twenty years, but in its day it was the undisputed arbiter of literary destinies. Dickens, Thackeray, Fitzgerald, Tennyson, Landor, all wrote for it while under John Forster's editorship. Its volumes provide a happy but tantalizing hunting-ground for the bibliographer desirous of identifying the anonymous writings of its many famous contributors. So far only three of Tennyson's contributions are acknowledged; another I have been able to identify beyond reasonable doubt. Of the three acknowledged, one ("Third of February, 1852") is included in the collected Works; of another ("Hands All Round") the version given in the Works is entirely rewritten, though in the Life it is given almost as first published. What reason can Tennyson have had for suppressing such stanzas as these:

The third poem ("Britons, Guard Your Own") has four of its original ten verses reprinted in the Life, but with the passing away of the buckram Third Empire, against which it was directed, passed away any reason for suppressing the original version of the poem. When published—January, 1852—Napoleon III. was thought to be ambitious to establish his empire on military glory, with England as the object of his intended attack. I quote two stanzas:

The following poem, from which I quote six stanzas, admits of little doubt. Where so little evidence may guide a decision it is worth noting that the name "Taliessen" signed to the poem in the Examiner was given a year or two later by Tennyson to a cliff near his Isle of Wight home. Taliessen, the splendid brow; perhaps a name given to Tennyson himself in the old Cambridge days—to whom could it have been more applicable?

The poem contains fifteen six-line stanzas. It is not hard to discover why Tennyson hesitated to acknowledge it; it is perhaps the most polemical he ever wrote. Its references to priestcraft are in the narrow traditional vein, quite other than should be expected from a man of Tennyson's culture, but quite in keeping with the references in "Britons,