which our intelligent critic does not like, appears to us perfect--in its place. Sweeter love-poetry than the finest parts of "Maud" is not to be found in the language; the remark being confined to the more superficial kinds of love. For the "tender passion" of the poem is, after all, superficial and thin: the strongest parts being the cynical. It has always been a grief to us that so much exquisite poetry (Cantos XII., XVIII., XXII., in Part I; and IV. in Part II.) should have been framed in what is really nothing but a very poor "sensation" novel, with a moral or lesson which is poorer still. Poetry is not bound to be unintermittingly poetic; there must be flat passages,--but such second-hand phrasing as "a war in defence of the right"--"that an iron tyranny now should bend or cease"--"a cause that I felt to be pure and true"--"a giant liar"--is intolerable in a poem of which the climax is so high-pitched. Better the merest conversational familiarity, than this rhetorical magniloquence. Before passing from Tennyson's poems, we cannot help noting a curious example of Dr. Bayne's tendency to excessive praise and admiration. In that very poor poem, "Sea-Dreams," the city clerk's wife induces her husband to forgive the just-dead man who has robbed them of their savings. Upon which Dr. Bayne remarks; "There is not a nobler heroine in literature than this wife of a city clerk, and I see no reason to believe that there are not many such to be found in London." Nor do we--six women out of ten exhibit every week of their lives "heroism" just as "noble." It is perfectly commonplace; and it is the critic's warm-heartedness which betrays him into these extravagancies of language.