Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/40

 show of fairness in the choice of representative passages; he bids us, like a new Hamlet rebuking the weakness and the shame of his mother-age, look here upon this picture and on this; and a counterfeit presentment it is indeed that he shows us. Taking an instance from his final essay, the summary and result of the book, we find a few lines from a slight poem of Mr. Tennyson's extreme youth, and one which is by no means a fair example of even his earliest manner, set against the most famous and the finest passage but one in "Childe Harold"—the description of an Alpine thunder-storm. With equal justice and with equal profit we might pick out the worst refuse of dolorous doggrel from the rubbish-heaps of "Hours of Idleness" or "Hebrew Melodies"—say that version of the 137th Psalm so admirably parodied by Landor, of which the indignant shade of Hopkins might howl rejection, while the milder ghost of Brady would dissolve in air if accused of it—that or such another rag or shard of verse from the sweepings of Byron's bad work—and set it against the majestic close of the "Lotus-eaters" or some passage of most finished exaltation from "In Memoriam." But the critic has yet a better trick than this, ingenious and ingenuous as it is, to pervert the judgment of those who might chance to take his evidence on trust. He has copied accurately the short passage chosen to show the immature genius of Tennyson at its feeblest; but the longer passage chosen,