ets
are a very hopeless generation, and will so continue unless they
utterly repent and amend. If they do not choose to awaken themselves
from within, all that is left for us is to hope that they may be
awakened from without, or by some radical revulsion in public taste
be shown their own real value and durability, and compelled to be
true and manly under pain of being laughed at and forgotten. A
general war might, amid all its inevitable horrors, sweep away at
once the dyspeptic unbelief, the insincere bigotry, the effeminate
frivolity which now paralyses our poetry as much as it does our
action, and strike from England's heart a lightning flash of noble
deeds, a thunder peal of noble song. Such a case is neither an
impossible nor a far-fetched one; let us not doubt that by some other
means if not by that, the immense volume of thought and power which
is still among us will soon find its utterance, and justify itself to
after ages by showing in harmonious and self-restrained poetry its
kinship to the heroic and the beautiful of every age and clime. And
till then, till the sunshine and the thaw shall come, and the spring
flowers burst into bud and bloom, heralding a new golden year in the
world's life, let us even be content with our pea-green and orange
fungi; nay, even admire them as not without their own tawdry beauty,
their clumsy fitness; for after all, they are products of nature,
though only of her dyspepsia; and grow and breed--as indeed cutaneous
disorders do--by an organic law of their own; fulfilling their little
destiny, and then making, according to Professor Way, by no means bad
manure. And so we take our leave of Mr. Alexander Smith, entreating
him, if these pages meet his eye, to consider three things, namely,
that in as far as he has written poetry, he is on the road to ruin by
reason of following the worst possible models. That in as far as the
prevailing taste has put these models before him, he is neither to
take much blame to himself, nor to be in anywise disheartened for the
future. That in as far as he shall utterly reverse his whole poetic
method, whether in morals or in aesthetics, leave undone all that he
has done, and do all that he has not done, he will become, what he
evidently, by grace of God, can become if he will, namely, a lasting
and a good poet.

TENNYSON {103}

Critics cannot in general be too punctilious in their respect for an
incognito. If an author intended us