Page:Tennyson - Walter Irving (1873).djvu/30



Mr Tennyson's verse does not lack for sound. There is so much shrilling, bellowing, roaring, and howling continually going on, that any one may easily be led to believe the poet had spent the greater part of his life in the neighbourhood of a menagerie.:

The Idylls of the King is a great failure, and as a poem it will be placed in the same category as Scott's Rokeby, and Southey's Thalaba, Not one person in a thousand can tell who wrote The Wits, or who wrote Madoc in Aztlan, yet both the authors were poets laureate: one was Sir William D'Avenant, the other Robert Southey, LL.D. It is plain the office-ship of Poet Laureate does not bestow immortality on its office-bearers. We have no prejudice against Mr Tennyson. We are only jealous for the honour of the great spirits who have helped to build up England's renown. We reverence their illustrious memory; we love to talk of the great things they accomplished; we visit the places consecrated by their dust, and when in solemn silence we think of him who sleeps in darkness, we involuntarily exclaim, "How great he was." We shall never think of Mr Tennyson after this fashion; we shall never say, we never have said, "How great he is." As we close our remarks, the city bells are ringing out the Old and ringing in the New Year, and, as we salute it, we bid a last farewell to the Idylls of the King.