into a dramatic form. The actors in this play, in spite of all the poet's devices to make them live, recall the speech of the melancholy Jaques : 'All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.' As we read, the events and the characters of history seem no more substantial than the 'shadows' in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' This is not what we feel in reading 'Henry V.' 6 The style of Queen Mary' is such as might be expected by the students of Mr. Tennyson's poems. It has a dash of archaism derived from Shakespeare, wanting, indeed, the heroic greatness of the latter's historic manner, but distinguished by all the vivid colour and peculiarity of the author's own narrative verse, which, however, is toned down and corrected by the use of dramatic forms. His epic mannerism has, in fact, produced a kind of dramatic mannerism; and though Queen Mary' is far less precise and affected in its versification than 'The Idylls of the King,' it contains many more lines that are harsh, rugged, and abrupt. The occasional use of the tribrach as a relief to the iambus is well, but there is a limit to the reader's indulgence, and this is really exceeded in verses' such as these, which we select almost at random :-· 6 Of half that subsidy levied on the people.'-(p. 39.) 'On Penenden heath a thousand of them-more.'-(p. 65.) And the crown naked to the people; the crown Our letters of commission will declare this plainlier.'-(p. 141.) (p. 271.) If lines like these, and the like may be found on almost every third page of 'Queen Mary,' be good blank verse, there must be many M. Jourdains among us who may congratulate themselves on having written poetry all their lives. In the following line the emphasis seems to be placed on the wrong word: 'And ev❜n before the Queen's face Gardiner buys them.' Yet the composition is careful and studied, and every desire is shown to keep up the reader's attention by novelties of expres sion. The following passage, in its argumentative dialectic, with its brevity, pregnancy, and antithesis, is in the poet's own unmistakable manner : 'GARDINER. The end's not come. No-nor this will come, Seeing there lie two ways to every end, In him who persecutes: when men are tost On tides of strange opinion, and not sure way Of their own selves, they are wroth with their own selves, Not the full faith, no, but the lurking doubt. Old Rome, that first made martyrs in the Church, This would not do for the stage; it is too subtle and metaphysical; but it is the right sort of style for the literary drama, as it keeps the reader's mind on the alert by a constant succession of intellectual puzzles. Characteristically enough, Mr. Tennyson is always at his best when he is descriptive. For instance: 'His eighty years Looked somewhat crooked on him in his frieze; On the other hand, he is not so successful in expressing emotion in act; the speeches have less of ardour than sentiment; what is meant to be tragic is often only painful, and what aims at being passionate, hysterical. The curious want of humour, which Mr. Tennyson so often betrays, may be seen in the following speech of Cranmer : 'Last night I dreamed the faggots were alight, Cool as the light in old decaying wood; And then King Harry looked from out a cloud, Really Really we thought it had been impossible to improve on Mr. Froude's canonisation of Henry VIII. But here is an apotheosis that quite throws it into the shade. If "the gods are not tickled with the exquisite picture of this royal cherub floating on a cloud, it will be a sign that the British stage has degenerated even more than we are inclined to believe. Mary's speech on the quickening of her child is as wanting in dramatic motive as in good taste; but the dying speech of Cranmer is really dramatic, and is rendered into blank verse from the original with great skill and fidelity. We are glad to see a lighter crop than usual of the monstrous compounds which Mr. Tennyson has helped to produce in modern English; indeed, the only one of which we greatly care to complain is brain-dizzied.' We can only repeat what we have said of similar words on a previous occasion, that this compound is bad English. Brain-dizzy' would be correct, but by every analogy of participial compounds-storm-tost,' 'iron-bound,' 'fancy-ridden' (to quote a compound of Mr. Tennyson's own in this play)- brain-dizzied' ought to mean 'dizzied by the brain,' not 'dizzied in the brain.' 6 6 To sum up our opinion of 'Queen Mary,' we are inclined to think it the best specimen of the literary drama which has been written in our time. It is, at least, admirable in form. It is better than Mr. Browning's dramatic studies, which have no form at all. It is better than The Spanish Gipsy,' which has a hybrid form. It is better than Bothwell,' as it has more backbone, and less of the enormous volume and verbosity, which, we think, would always prevent Mr. Swinburne from achieving success as a dramatist. Of the dramatic spirit, in the Shakespearian sense, the play, as we have said, has nothing; it lacks the personal interest which might recall the genius of national action, and excite the ardour of patriotism by the representation on the stage of great historic examples. It is guilty, too, of the blunder at once historical and dramatic, of making a heroine out of Bloody Mary. Of course it will be acted. Tib and Joan will appear in miraculously accurate costumes of the period; Aldgate will be very 'richly decorated;' we shall be delighted with the exact representation of Lambeth Palace and St. Mary's Church; and a popular actress will doubtless draw tears from sympathetic eyes when she exclaims that 'she has slain her Philip!' It will be acted, and then, like all plays that want the soul of action, it will disappear from the stage. But as an intellectual exercise, as a scientific study of abstract motives, as a stimulant of those subtle ideas which the luxurious modern imagination delights to substitute for action, as a monument of ingenious and refined refined expression, in all these points Mr. Tennyson's drama may long continue to afford pleasure to the reader. And more than this, at a time when the tradition of the poetical drama has been forgotten on the stage, it would perhaps be idle to expect. ART. IX.-1. Lawlessness, Malcolm MacColl, M.A. 2. Contemporary Review.' Sacerdotalism, and Ritualism. By 1875. June and July, 1875. THE whose cives, the attitude of those on whose demeanour HE whole country has watched with much anxiety,. if from the peace, and perhaps the existence, of the National Church depends, with regard to the Public Worship Regulation Act which has just come into operation. It might have been hoped that those who have for a long time supported the so-called Catholic revival, which others persist in considering as an attempt to undo the Reformation, would have admitted that they had reached and overpassed the limit of what was possible for them. It might have been hoped that that great High Church party, which does not sympathise with Rome, would have spoken out by its most influential members, and would have shown that in a collision with law and authority the extreme party could no longer count upon its support. It might have been hoped that some serious attempt would have been made to arrive at a general understanding as to ritual usages, extending not only to the two sections we have mentioned, but to every party in the Church. It did not seem absurd to expect that the Evangelical party would have been content to modify their own usages in some points for the sake of the great object of allaying our unhappy divisions. To those who have formed such hopes, recent events must have carried much disappointment. The Pastoral Address of the Bishops was a sign that the episcopal body had arrived at an amount of agreement never perhaps before attainable in respect to subjects so much controverted; whilst the flying off of a single bishop at either flank was a proof, if any had been wanted, that the compact array was not marching under orders, but had thought out the subject, and formed a deliberate and almost unanimous conviction. Amongst the bishops, at least, there were many who, having looked with no disfavour on the beginning of the 'revival' movement, felt bound to join in an exhortation to observe the law, and in view of a great crisis to remember the high interests, national and ecclesiastical, which a prolonga tion of strife would endanger. To some extent the same feelings and convictions have made themselves felt in other classes also. But, on the other hand, it is but too plain that a policy of resistance has found active and numerous supporters, and that the new procedure of the Public Worship Regulation Act will not be allowed to go to rust from disuse. We are obliged to refer first to a book of which it would have been more agreeable not to have spoken at all. But besides the theological interest attaching to the questions touched in it, this work is a conspicuous example of a particular style of controversy, and the consideration we are about to give it may possibly teach some other controversialists the important lesson what to avoid. Lord Selborne had given utterance in the debate on the third reading of the Public Worship Bill to an opinion shared by all the laity of every shade of opinion, that there is considerable lawlessness at present. The Rev. Malcolm MacColl addresses himself to answer this in a book of about 500 pages, but of the texture of a pamphlet, with the title 'Lawlessness, Sacerdotalism, and Ritualism.' It is natural that, defending himself and his friends from the charge of disobeying the law, he should try to show that the legal decisions are such as ought not to be obeyed. He goes much further. By liberal abuse of the Supreme Court, for inaccuracy and dishonesty, he tries to inspire the reader with a general impression of his own exactness; and he deals in the meantime with well-known facts with a careless disregard, to which we have known no parallel. That a man should write English history over again out of his own mind, as indifferent to obstructive facts as the Bessemer ship is to the wavelets of a calm sea, is a little surprising; that he should do so, dealing round him, to hide the process, every charge of unfairness and ignorance that imagination can supply, might perhaps warrant a severer feeling than surprise. Here are some specimens of the language which he applies to the Court of Final Appeal. The charges are sometimes founded on the most frivolous grounds, and sometimes on a want of understanding of the subject. He says that the Court has given a 'flat contradiction to the language of the Prayer-Book' (p. 17); that an examining chaplain would refuse to pass a candidate for holy orders who displayed such gross ignorance' (p. 19); that the Court revels in ignorant assumption' (p. 20); that its blunders in matters of gravest import are extraordinary' (p. 21); that it is guilty of inaccuracies, mutual contradictions, and unfairness' (p. 31); that its ruling is inconsistent with one of the cardinal principles of the law of the land' (p. 32); that it uses ' arbitrary 6 6 |