kings in Christendom, to forbear to use any means to hinder the dishonour of my nation in my person."

It was thus made evident that Whitelocke would not scruple to prove (as he told the Archbishop of Upsala, when questioned as to his exercise of ecclesiastical patronage, as Keeper of the Great Seal) that he carried his orders by his side, and the point was forthwith yielded. He went to Court to the masque, where he did not find the Dane, but learned that the Queen highly commended him for his resolution, and said that he was a stout and faithful servant to the Protector, and to his nation, and that she should love him the better for it. Upon another occasion, when the High Admiral stepped betwixt the Queen and Whitelocke, at an audience, he was by Whitelocke put aside, and Whitelocke stood next to the Queen on her right hand, her Majesty remarking that "he did well to make them know themselves and him the better."

It

To his fellow-ministers and to the great men of the court Whitelocke's hospitality was profuse, and it seems to have met but a poor return, as he was but once invited to a private Swedish dinner during his residence. is true this entertainment was a remarkable one, the host being Count Eric Oxenstiern, and the list of guests comprising the renowned Chancellor himself, and some of the most distinguished officials of the kingdom. All honour was done upon this occa sion to the Ambassador: they had excellent Rhenish wine and indifferent good sack and claret; but he was not asked to pledge a single toast, and as a special respect to him pipes and tobacco were set upon the table with the dessert, when he and two or three more of the company partook of the fragrant Indian weed.

The object of Whitelocke's mission was successfully accomplished. By the alliance with Sweden, and the peace simultaneously ratified with Holland, to the successful conclusion of which the impression made upon the Swedish court no doubt materially contributed, the foreign policy of Cromwell was placed upon a firm basis. In the same year (1654) he concluded a treaty with Denmark, whereby the question of the navigation of the Sound was settled by definite regulations; and as the Dutch treaty in

cluded the Swiss Protestant cantons, the Hanse towns, and some of the Protestant states of North Germany, a grand league in defence of freedom of opinion was established. Had the confederacy then formed been held together and guided, in subsequent generations, by a fitting successor to Cromwell, the difficulty of the present time would in all probability have been nipped in the bud. That it was even then germinating, is shown by several incidents told in Whitelocke's journal, and by his mention of conver sations with Oxenstiern touching Mus covia, Poland, and the North generally, the substance of which, it is to be regretted, he does not record. A com parison between the wisdom of the minister and friend of the great Gustavus with that of the plenipotentiaries of the Vienna conference, in reference to the same points, would have been truly interesting. During Whitelocke's stay at Upsala, a curious foreshadowing of the wolf-and-lamb quarrel of our own day was exhibited in the arrival of an embassy from the great Duke of Muscovia, to acquaint her Majesty that the Great Duke had begun a war with the King of Poland, because in a letter of his to the Great Duke he had omitted one of his titles, and "because a certain Governor of a province in Poland, in a writing, had placed the name of the father of the Great Duke before the name of the present Great Duke; which was so great an indignity, that for the same the now Great Duke demanded of the King of Poland to have the head of that Governor sent to him, and that not being done was another ground of the begun war." The Menschikoff of 1653 was "a tall, big man, with a large, rude black beard, pale countenance, and ill demeanour. habit was a long robe of purple cloth, laced with a small gold lace, the livery of his master. On his right hand was a companion in the same livery, and much like the envoy in feature and be haviour; he carried on high the Great Duke's letters, set in a frame of wood, with a covering of crimson sarsenet over them. On the left hand of the envoy was his interpreter. After his uncouth reverences made, he spoke to the Queen in his own language. The greatest part of his harangue in the beginning might be understood to be setting out his master's titles. In the midst of his speech he was quite out, but after a little pause recovered him

His

self again with the assistance of a paper. When he had done, one of the Queen's servants interpreted in Swed. ish what was said; then one of the Queen's secretaries answered in Swedish to what the envoy had spoken, and that was interpreted to him in his own language by his own interpreter. After this the envoy cast himself flat upon his face on the floor, and seemed to kiss it; then rising up again, he went and kissed the Queen's hand, holding his own hands behind him. In the same order his fellow demeaned himself, and presented to the Queen his master's letters. The Queen gave the letter to Whitelocke to look on it: it was sealed with an eagle."

It is pretty evident that this formal communication of the dealings of the Czar with the "sick man" of that day was designed to serve the purpose of intimidating Sweden. It nowise essentially differed in character from the more explicit intimation given by the Czar Alexander to Sir Hamilton Seymour, that he would not permit a pistol to be fired in the cause of Turkey; while the insolent rudeness of Prince Menschikoff to the Turkish ministers was scarcely exceeded by the message of his prototype to the Court of Upsala, that the first appointment for his audience must be changed, as notice of it not having been given to him till about ten o'clock in the morning, he was already drunk, and could not attend. It is equally manifest, from the manner in which Christina received the Russian ambassador- so different from that in which she welcomed Cromwell's envoy that she entertained a supreme contempt for her barbarous neighbour and his representative. She did not condescend to reply to the latter with her own lips, and she absolutely refused to express an opinion as to the cause of quarrel with Poland. Whitelocke seems to have despised Muscovia quite as profoundly as the Queen. The political storm then apprehended did not appear to threaten from the North. In that particular the lapse of two centuries has made a change, and it is such as ought to strengthen, in a high degree, the political affinity between Sweden and England. It is true, the magnanimity and valour of Gustavus Adolphus,

and the wisdom and fidelity of Oxenstiern, are now but precious memories of the past; and the strong will and dauntless national policy of Cromwell are with us little more; but an equal love of freedom, and an equal veneration for their ancient constitutional modes of enjoying it, do, we trust, still form strong bonds between the two nations, and it is plainly the interest of both to draw them closer. The case demands in its treatment no diplomatic refinements. It could be dealt with satisfactorily by any two plain men who could read and comprehend the short dialogues between Oxenstiern and Whitelocke, recorded by the latter. Nor need Lord Clarendon tax his ingenuity to indite instructions for the English plenipotentiary: here they are, ready to his hand, as they were delivered to Bulstrode Whitelocke at Whitehall two hundred years ago::

"If you shall find, upon a general deliberation with the Queen concerning the ground and the importance thereof to both States, that she is sensible of the oppressions and restraints which is put upon trade here, and that she is inclinable to join with the Parliament for removing the same, you are to let her know that the Parliament is willing to send into those seas, in fit and convenient time, a fleet so considerable that may be able, through God's blessing, to defend itself against the contrary party. And therefore are desirous to know what assistance Sweden will contribute for the countenance and carrying on of the undertaking, so just in itself, and so advantageous to both nations."

The contrary party was then Holland and Denmark; it is now Russia, and mayhap Prussia. The cause o war was then nominally commercial restraint; it is now political aggres. sion. Corrections in the phraseology of the instruction may be made ac cordingly; the frank offer of an al. liance offensive and defensive needs no alteration. It may stand as it passed from under the hand of Walter Strickland, on the 28th of October, 1653; and, thus put, it will indeed be strange if it be not accepted by Sweden as readily as it then was. Without the conclusion of such a league, the sacrifices of the war will have been made in vain.

SOME five years or so have passed since Alfred Tennyson gave to the world a poem of any considerable length. The laurel crown was then upon the brows of a dying poet. Then, too, the world was at rest; and we heard throughout the broad British lands but the thunder of the factory hammers, and the shuttle whirring in its flight to and fro, and the dull beat of the steam-loom. Peace was urging on her holy mission-accomplishing her great work of making men as gods in wisdom and in power; and Industry and Commerce were rearing up their temples and palaces. These five years have passed away, and wrought their changes upon man, and man's world, and man's work. Wordsworth lies in his honoured grave at Grasmere, reposing beneath the green turf, under the sycamores and yews of a country churchyard, and by the side of a beautiful stream, amid the mountains which he loved;" and Tennyson wears worthily the poetic crown, the meetest successor to the old tuneful sage of Rydall; and the mightiest war, in its present effects as well as in its future results, that the world has ever witnessed, is raging from the Baltic to the Black Sea, costing us and our allies every day that the sun rises a quarter of a million pounds sterling, and a thousand human lives, bringing, as the ghastly satellites of its march, to use the words of Tennyson, in his glorious poem of "The Princess"

"The desecrated shrine, the trampled year, The smouldering homestead, and the household flower, Torn from the lintel--all the common wrong;"

and the very spirit of war that has fever. ed the blood of so many young hearts, has somehow stirred the spirit of our laureate himself, and so he gives the world a poem which, though not of war, is yet full of such thoughts as warlike times not unnaturally wake up in a poetic temperament.

Maud," the principal poem in the volume before us, is one which, though it might make the reputation of a new poet, will not, we are disposed to think, add anything to the fame of the laureate of the author of "Locksley Hall and the Talking Oak," and above all, of "The Princess." As a whole, it is incomplete and unsatisfying: taken in detached pieces, it has passages of power and of beauty fire, vigour, tenderness, and passion that are not surpassed in anything that has come from his pen. And like all of Tennyson's, save his very lightest ballads, there is a deep reflective undercurrent of philosophy that demands more than one thoughtful perusal, and a fine poetic richness that is given out the more one deals with the verse, as odour is expressed from flowers the more one handles them.

The reader collects readily enough, from the somewhat abrupt and discon tinuous sections into which the poem is broken, what is the plot of the story. A youth, the hero of a tale of which he is himself the narrator, is an orphan; his father has failed in his speculations, and met a terrible death, accidental, or more probably, as is darkly hinted, suicidal

tage passes away, and is purchased by an old hard money-getting man, who

1855.

becomes "lord of the broad estate and the Hall;" while the young orphan retires to an humbler home, where, in solitude and bitterness, he nourishes the discontent of his heart, and grows misanthropic and somewhat savage in spirit:

"Living alone in an empty house,

Here half hid in the gleaming wood, Where I hear the dead at midday moan, And the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse,

And my own sad name in corners cried, When the shiver of dancing leaves is thrown

About its echoing chambers wide,

Till a morbid bate and horror have grown Of a world in which I have hardly mixt, And a morbid eating lichen fixt

On a heart half turn'd to stone."

The musings of the lad are just what may be expected from a nature at once passionate, sensitive, and morbid: he is dissatisfied with everything about him, and arraigns the social condition of the age with great fierceness and splenetic vehemence. These thoughts are expressed by the poet in a measure which it strikes us is designedly hurried and tumultuous, and not unfrequently inharmonious and broken; indeed, at times, even the language is coarse, and something worse than coarse, but still not the less true to nature, or the less vigorous or effective. Here is one of those caustic soliloquies in which, with a bitter and mocking skill, the heart of society is laid bare, and the evil workings of man's nature exhibited with a scornful power:

Whether this view is overcharged or not, we shall not here stop to inquire. We believe ourselves it is so; but if

there be exaggeration, it is such as conduces to poetic effect, and is, at all events, in accordance with the mood of

the hero of the poem, whose eye is too jaundiced to see things in a true or a kindly light. And there is another thought to increase the diseased state of the young man's mind, crossing his vision and marring his peace. Maud, the daughter of the old millionaire, who buys the Hall-she who was the beloved of his mother, the playmate of his childhood, the delight of the village-who promised in her

childhood to be so fair, is now reported to be singularly beautiful. The subject is too painful to one of his fallen fortunes, and the boy is both jealous and angry, and shows his spirit and temper somewhat unamiably, and seeks to set his heart at rest by railing at the sex in the old, time-sanctioned and approved fashion, and in phraseology, it must be confessed, neither very reverent nor very ornate :

With all respect for the laureate, we are somewhat disposed to think that there is not much poetry in such a passage as this which we have just quoted. The sentiments may be very natural and vigorously expressed-perhaps, indeed, somewhat too vigorously; but that will not make the expression of them poetical. The muse of poetry must not range with too free a foot through all the common highways of life. She is not like the sun, that shines on the mean and the base things of the world, as well as on the beautiful and the noble. There are thoughts and things that are commonplace, and vulgar, and offensive in their essence, and they will not cease to be commonplace, and vulgar, and offensive, though they be exhibited in metre or in rhyme. Nay, they become the more so, because the sense of the beautiful and the ornate, which is ever present with the muse, is outraged; and thus one will not tolerate in poetry that coarseness which, in prose, is sometimes an element of vigour. There is no man living who is better able to dispense with this affectation-for we look upon it as nothing more than an affectation-than Alfred Tennyson. There is no man who should more thoroughly despise the singularity of a rude style or a hobbling line, than he who has given the world such treasures of fine thoughts in the most exquisite mode of expression, and the most perfect forms of melody. We make this protest at the outset, on the very first occasion that has offered itself in our ex

amination of "Maud," as there are more passages than one in the poem which are disfigured, in our judgment, by this same fault, and calculated to detract from the value of the whole composition, as well as injure the fame of the author. Let this pass, however; it may be that Tennyson has advisedly used a phraseology and style thus harsh and unpoetical-for such we hold it to be-to heighten, by contrast, the effects of other portions of the poem, as musicians introduce discords in the midst of their finest harmonies. Certainly we find these poetic discords always followed by melo. dies such as the hand of Tennyson alone can ring out from the lyre. Thus, after this rude, and fierce, and vulgar outbreak of passion, the young man sees Maud, and he feels that she is thoroughly beautiful, and the potency of that beauty comes upon his heart with a dulcifying influence, and breaks down, little by little, the hard icy crust in which he has in vain encased it; and these gradual changes are indicated with great skill, and with delicate, unostentatious touches, by the poet. At first, the youth only admits that she is perfectly beautiful "dead perfection, no more;" but the spell of that beauty is upon him, and dispels his spleen, and his pride, and his bitterness; and again and again every feature haunts him. All this transition of feeling is thus beautifully suggested in the soliloquy of the lover :