_Queen Mary_ was not, on the whole, pronounced a success, and _Harold_, roughly speaking, is to _Queen Mary_ what that work is to the author's earlier masterpieces. _Harold_ is not in the least bad: it contains nothing ridiculous, unreasonable, or disagreeable; it is only decidedly weak, decidedly colourless, and tame. The author's inspiration is like a fire which is quietly and contentedly burning low. The analogy is perfectly complete. The hearth is clean swept and the chimney-side is garnished with its habitual furniture; but the room is getting colder and colder, and the occasional little flickers emitted by the mild embers are not sufficient to combat the testimony of the poetical thermometer. There is nothing necessarily harsh in this judgment. Few fires are always at a blaze, and the imagination, which is the most delicate machine in the world, cannot be expected to serve longer than a good gold repeater. We must take what it gives us, in every case, and be thankful. Mr. Tennyson is perfectly welcome to amuse himself with listening to the fainter tick of his honoured time-piece; it is going still, unquestionably; it has not stopped. Only we may without rudeness abstain from regulating our engagements by the indications of the instrument. _Harold_ seems at first to have little, in form, that is characteristic of the author--little of the thoroughly familiar Tennysonian quality. Nevertheless, there is every now and then a line which arrests the ear by the rhythm and cadence which have always formed the chief mystery in the art of imitating the Laureate. Meeting in the early pages such a line as "What, with this flaming horror overhead?" we should suspect we were reading Tennyson if we did not know it; and our suspicion would he amply confirmed by half a dozen other lines: "Taken the rifted pillars of the wood." "My greyhounds fleeting like a beam of light." "Suffer a stormless shipwreck in the pools." "That scared the dying conscience of the king." _Harold_ is interesting as illustrating, in addition to _Queen Mary_, Mr. Tennyson's idea of what makes a drama. A succession of short scenes, detached from the biography of a historical character, is, apparently, to his sense sufficient; the constructive side of the work is thereby reduced to a primitive simplicity. It is even more difficult to imagine acting _Harold_ than it was to imagine acting _Queen Mary_; and it is probable that in this case the experiment will not be tried. And yet the story, or rather the historical episode, upon which Mr. Tennyson has here laid his hand is eminently interesting.