But Thucydides’ _History of the Peloponnesian War_, either of the two great classic epics, or any striking historic passage in even so ungraphic a writer as Lingard, is more dramatic than this drama. The feeble plot gives birth to feebler impersonations. They come and go without making any deep impression upon us, or seizing our attention by any striking originality. Their features are indistinct, their actions insignificant. They are bloodless and colorless. They are ghosts, things of air, whom a feeble incantation has summoned from their slumber, who mutter a few laborious Spartanisms in a renewed life in which they seem to have no concern, and vanish without provoking a regret, nor even an emotion. We observe in them such an absence of verisimilitude, so marked a want of truth to nature, as very much to weaken, when it does not entirely destroy, the dramatic illusion. Nowhere is this more observable than where he intends most manifestly a rivalry of Shakspere. Shakspere not unseldom introduces the multitude into his poetic history. But when he does so, it seizes our interest as forcibly as his more important personages. With a few rapid touches he dashes in a few typical individuals, who reveal to us vividly what the whole kind of thing is of which they are prominent units. They are the mob of the very time and place to which they belong. Whether at Rome in the time of Julius Cæsar, or at Mantua or Verona in the Middle Ages, or in England during the time of the Tudors, we feel that they act and speak just as then and there they might have said and done. Every one, too, has his or her distinct individuality. And such a verisimilitude have they that even an occasional anachronism, such as, in _Troilus and Cressida_, making a Trojan servant talk of _being in the state of grace_, does not dispel the charm. But Mr. Tennyson’s mob-types have no more striking features to seize our interest than his more exalted creations, whilst his anachronisms are of a kind which send all verisimilitude to the winds. Joan and Tib, and the four or five citizens, have nothing in them for which they should be singled out of the very ordinary condition of life to which they belong. And we are tempted to sneer when we hear an Elizabethan mob talking like Hampshire or Yorkshire peasants of the present day. For all that, Mr. Tennyson’s cockneys and rustics are not his most ineffective portraiture. We experience a slight sensation of their having been lugged in, perhaps because of the inevitable comparison with Shakspere they provoke, and we feel them to be too modern; but the poet’s sense of humor here serves him in good stead, and although, in this respect, immeasurably below Shakspere, he gives a kind of raciness to his plebeians which saves them from being an absolute failure.