This is not the grandness of crime, as in Richard III., or even in Lady Macbeth. It is the petty despotism of a weak and silly woman. There is no greatness of any kind about it. It is the mere triumphant chuckle of an amorous queen, wooing a more than indifferent husband. It is little--little enough for a comedy. There is something approaching the tragic in the desolation of her last moments. Calais is lost, her husband hates her, her people hate her. But the poet has already robbed her of the dignity of her position. She has forfeited our esteem. We experience an ordinary sympathy with her. But her fate is only what was to be expected. And the highest pathos is out of the question. When, following the example of her injured mother in the play of _Henry VIII._, she betakes herself to lute and song, the author insists on a comparison with Shakspere, and beside the full notes of the Bard of Avon the petty treble of the Laureate pipe shrinks to mediocrity. But the most unpardonable of Mr. Tennyson’s imitations of Shakspere are those in which he rings the changes on the celebrated passage about “no Italian priest shall tithe nor toll in our dominions,” which inevitably provokes the applause of those amongst a theatrical audience who do not know what it means--unpardonable, because it makes even Shakspere himself as ridiculous as a poor travesty cannot fail to do. He was content with one such passage throughout his many plays. If Terence had filtered the noble sentiment of his celebrated passage, “Ego homo sum, et nihil humanum a me alienum,” through a variety of forms, it would have excited the laughter instead of the plaudits of the Roman “gods.” But the author of _Queen Mary_ is not afraid to pose _his_ sentiment, itself borrowed in no less than three different attitudes in one play; committing the additional absurdity of thrusting it, like a quid of tobacco, into the cheek of two different personages. Gardiner uses it twice, Elizabeth once: “Yet I know well [says the former] Your people … Will brook nor Pope nor Spaniard here to play The tyrant, or in commonwealth or church”; and again, with questionable taste: “And see you, we shall have to _dodge_ again, And let the Pope trample our rights, and plunge His _foreign fist_ into our island church, To plump the leaner pouch of Italy”; whilst Elizabeth is made to vulgarize it beyond hope of redemption into a mere petty ebullition of splenetic womanly vanity: “Then, Queen indeed! No foreign prince or priest Should fill my throne, myself upon the steps.”