These merits have ceased to be disputed, but, though a loyal Tennysonian, I have never quite been able to reconcile myself to _Maud_ as a whole. The hero is an unwholesome young man, and not of an original kind. He is _un beau ténébreux_ of 1830. I suppose it has been observed that he is merely The Master of Ravenswood in modern costume, and without Lady Ashton. Her part is taken by Maud’s brother. The situations of the hero and of the Master (whose acquaintance Thackeray never renewed after he lost his hat in the Kelpie Flow) are nearly identical. The families and fathers of both have been ruined by “the gray old wolf,” and by Sir William Ashton, representing the house of Stair. Both heroes live dawdling on, hard by their lost ancestral homes. Both fall in love with the daughters of the enemies of their houses. The loves of both are baffled, and end in tragedy. Both are concerned in a duel, though the Master, on his way to the ground, “stables his steed in the Kelpie Flow,” and the wooer in _Maud_ shoots Lucy Ashton’s brother,—I mean the brother of Maud,—though duelling in England was out of date. Then comes an interval of madness, and he recovers amid the patriotic emotions of the ill-fated Crimean expedition. Both lovers are gloomy, though the Master has better cause, for the Tennysonian hero is more comfortably provided for than Edgar with his “man and maid,” his Caleb and Mysie. Finally, both _The Bride of Lammermoor_, which affected Tennyson so potently in boyhood (“_A merry merry bridal_, _A merry merry day_”), and _Maud_, excel in passages rather than as wholes. The hero of _Maud_, with his clandestine wooing of a girl of sixteen, has this apology, that the match had been, as it were, predestined, and desired by the mother of the lady. Still, the brother did not ill to be angry; and the peevishness of the hero against the brother and the parvenu lord and rival strikes a jarring note. In England, at least, the general sentiment is opposed to this moody, introspective kind of young man, of whom Tennyson is not to be supposed to approve. We do not feel certain that his man and maid were “ever ready to slander and steal.” That seems to be part of his jaundiced way of looking at everything and everybody. He has even a bad word for the “man-god” of modern days,— “The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain, An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor.”