be expected, was carried away at an earlier period and in
rather a worse state, than was usual with him. When some of his friends
condoled with him next day, and attributed his misfortune to six bottles
of claret which he had imbibed, the Alderman was extremely
indignant--'the claret,' he said, 'was sound, and never could do any man
any harm--his discomfiture was altogether caused by that damned single
strawberry' which he had kept all night at the bottom of his
glass.--_The Quarterly Review_.

[Footnote O: See Quarterly Review, vol. XIX, p. 204.]

[Footnote P: The same Camelot, in Somersetshire, we presume, which is
alluded to by Kent in 'King Lear'--

'Goose! if I had thee upon Sarum plain,
I'd drive thee cackling home to Camelot.'
]

_The Princess; a Medley_. By Alfred Tennyson. Moxon.

That we are behind most even of our heaviest and slowest contemporaries
in the notice of this volume, is a fact for which we cannot
satisfactorily account to ourselves, and can therefore hardly hope to be
able to make a valid excuse to our readers. The truth is, that whenever
we turned to it we became, like the needle between positive and negative
electric poles, so attracted and repelled, that we vibrated too much to
settle to any fixed condition. Vacillation prevented criticism, and we
had to try the experiment again and again before we could arrive at the
necessary equipose to indicate the right direction of taste and opinion.
We will now, however, note our variations, and leave them to the public
judgment.

The first lines of the prologue were repulsive, as a specimen of the
poorest Wordsworth manner and style--

"Sir Walter Vivian all a summer's day
Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun
Up to his people: thither flock'd at noon
His tenants, wife and child, and thither half
The neighbouring borough with their Institute
Of which he was the patron. I was there
From college, visiting the son,--the son
A Walter too,--with others of our set."

The "wife and child" of the tenants is hardly intelligible; and the
"set" is but a dubious expression. Nor can we clearly comprehend the
next line and a half--

"And me that morning Walter show'd the house,
Greek, set with busts:"

Does this mean that Sir Walter Vivian inhabited a Greek house, and that
the college "set" were guests in that dwelling "set with busts"? To say
the least, this is inelegant, and the affectations proc