But on the other hand we must recollect that very long ago, when the apparition of invasion from across the Channel had as yet spoiled no man's slumbers, Mr. Tennyson's blood was already up:[2]-- For the French, the Pope may shrive them ... And the merry devil drive them Through the water and the fire. [2] "Poems chiefly Lyrical," 1830, p. 142. And unhappily in the beginning of "Maud," when still in the best use of such wits as he possesses, its hero deals largely in kindred extravagances (p. 7):-- When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee, And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones, Is it peace or war? better war! loud war by land and by sea, War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones. He then anticipates that, upon an enemy's attacking this country, "the smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue," who typifies the bulk of the British people, "the nation of shopkeepers," as it has been emasculated and corrupted by excess of peace, will leap from his counter and till to charge the enemy; and thus it is to be reasonably hoped that we shall attain to the effectual renovation of society. We frankly own that our divining rod does not enable us to say whether the poet intends to be in any and what degree sponsor to these sentiments, or whether he has put them forth in the exercise of his undoubted right to make vivid and suggestive representations of even the partial and narrow aspects of some endangered truth. This is at best, indeed, a perilous business, for out of such fervid partial representations nearly all grave human error springs; and it should only be pursued with caution and in season. But we do not recollect that 1855 was a season of serious danger from a mania for peace and its pursuits; and even if it had been so, we fear that the passages we have quoted far overpass all the bounds of moderation and good sense. It is, indeed, true that peace has its moral perils and temptations for degenerate man, as has every other blessing, without exception, that he can receive from the hand of God. It is moreover not less true that, amidst the clash of arms, the noblest forms of character may be reared, and the highest acts of duty done; that these great and precious results may be due to war as their cause; and that one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of country, receives a powerful and general stimulus from the bloody strife. But this is as the furious cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue of his daughter; as the butchering sentence of Herod raised without doubt many a mother's love into heroic sublimity; as plague, as famine, as fire, as flood, as every curse and every scourge that is wielded by an angry Providence for the chastisement of man, is an appointed instrument for tempering human souls in the seven-times heated furnace of affliction, up to the standard of angelic and archangelic virtue. War, indeed, has the property of exciting much