The great merit of Mr. Tennyson's drama, however, is not in the quotableness of certain passages, but in the thoroughly elevated spirit of the whole. He desired to make us feel of what sound manly stuff the Englishmen of that Tudor reign of terror needed to be, and his verse is pervaded by the echo of their deep-toned refusal to abdicate their manhood. The temper of the poem, on this line, is so noble that the critic who has indulged in a few strictures as to matters of form feels as if he had been frivolous and niggardly. I nevertheless venture to add in conclusion that _Queen Mary_ seems to me a work of rare ability rather than great inspiration; a powerful _tour de force_ rather than a labour of love. But though it is not the best of a great poet's achievement, only a great poet could have written it. II. HAROLD The author of _Queen Mary_ seems disposed to show us that that work was not an accident, but rather, as it may be said, an incident of his literary career. The incident has just been repeated, though _Harold_ has come into the world more quietly than its predecessor. It is singular how soon the public gets used to unfamiliar notions. By the time the reader has finished _Harold_ he has almost contracted the habit of thinking of Mr. Tennyson as a writer chiefly known to fame by "dramas" without plots and dialogues without point. This impression it behooves him, of course, to shake off if he wishes to judge the book properly. He must compare the author of "Maud" and the earlier _Idyls_ with the great poets, and not with the small. _Harold_ would be a respectable production for a writer who had spent his career in producing the same sort of thing, but it is a somewhat graceless anomaly in the record of a poet whose verse has, in a large degree, become part of the civilisation of his day.