somewhat harsh, abrupt language, and irregular metres. Such elements, in truth, hardly seemed so congenial to him as to Byron or Hugo. Yet they were welcome, as proving that our chief poet was not altogether irresponsive to the terrible social problems around him, to the corruptions, and ever-festering vices of the body politic, to the doubt, denial, and grim symptoms of upheaval at his very doors. For on the whole some of us had felt that the Poet-Laureate was almost too well contented with the general framework of things, with the prescriptive rights of long-unchallenged rule, and hoar comfortable custom, especially in England, as though these were in very deed divine, and no subterranean thunder were ever heard, even in this favored isle, threatening Church and State, and the very fabric of society. But the temper of his class and time spoke through him. Did not all men rejoice greatly when Prince Albert opened the Exhibition of 1851; when Cobden and the Manchester school won the battle of free-trade; when steam-engines and the electric telegraph were invented; when Wordsworth’s “glorious time” came, and the Revised Code passed into law; when science first told her enchanting fairy tales? Yet the Millennium tarries, and there is an exceeding “bitter cry.” But in “Maud,” as indeed before in that fine sonorous chaunt, “Locksley Hall,” and later in “Aylmer’s Field,” the poet’s emphasis of appreciation is certainly reserved for the heroes, men who have inherited a strain of gloom, or ancestral disharmony moral and physical, within whom the morbific social humors break forth inevitably into plague-spots; the injustice and irony of circumstance lash them into revolt, wrath, and madness. Mr. R. H. Hutton, a critic who often writes with ability, but who seems to find a little difficulty in stepping outside the circle of his perhaps rather rigid misconceptions and predilections, makes the surely somewhat strange remark that “‘Maud’ was written to reprobate hysterics.” But I fear—nay, I hope and believe—that we cannot credit the poet with any such virtuous or didactic intention in the present instance, though of course the pregnant lines beginning “Of old sat Freedom on the heights,” the royal verses, the recent play so forcibly objected to by Lord Queensberry, together with various allusions to the “red fool-fury of the Seine,” and “blind hysterics of the Celt,” do indicate a very Conservative and law-abiding attitude. But other lines prove that after all what he mostly deprecates is “the falsehood of extremes,” the blind and hasty plunge into measures of mere destruction; for he praises the statesmen who “take occasion by the hand,” and make “the bounds of freedom wider yet,” and even gracefully anticipates “the golden year.”