h lines as these (no picture of
tropical loveliness ever surpassed, in our opinion, the description
printed in italics) that we admire "Locksley Hall," than on account of
the troubled passions which it embodies; knowing as we do, that poetry
has nobler offices to perform than to fulmine forth fierce and sarcastic
invectives against the head of a jilt; and if, as Mr Tennyson says,
"love is love for evermore," we would ask even him why he did not make
the lover in "Locksley Hall" betray, even in spite of himself, a more
pitiful tenderness for the devoted heroine of the tale? How different
the strain of the manly Schiller under similar circumstances! _His_
bitterness cannot be restrained from breaking down at last in a flood of
tenderness over the lost mistress of his affections.

"Oh! what scorn for thy desolate years
Shall I feel! God forbid it should be!
How bitter will then be the tears
Shed, Minna, oh Minna, for thee!"

But if it be true that "Locksley Hall" is somewhat deficient in the
ethereal tenderness which would overcome a true heart, even when
blighted in its best affections, it was not to be expected that its
imitator should have been visited with deeper glimpses of the divine.
The indignant passions of his unrequited lover are, indeed, passions of
the most ignoble clay--not one touch of elevated feeling lifts him for
a moment out of the mire. The whole train of circumstances which
engender his emotions, prove the lover, in this case, to have been the
silliest of mortal men, and his mistress, from the very beginning of his
intercourse with her, to have been one of the most abandoned of her sex.
"Lilian" is a burlesque on disappointed love, and a travestie of the
passions which such a disappointment entails. We know not which are the
more odious and revolting in their expression--the emotions of the
jilted lover, or the incidents which call them into play.

The poem is designed to illustrate the bad effects produced on the
female mind by the reading of French novels. We have nothing to say in
their defence. But the incongruity lies here--that Lilian, who was
seduced by means of these noxious publications, was evidently a lady of
the frailest virtue from the very first; and her lover might have seen
this with half an eye. Her materials were obviously of the most
inflammable order; and it evidently did not require the application of
such a spark as the seducer Winton, with his formidable ar