to the statuary; but we beg pardon-modern lionesses have it all their own way in many a man-shaming novel. The conception of the Princess Ida seems to be derived from the ancient Goddess of the Chace. She is a modified, civilised Diana, who has not quite the heart to slay Actæon outright, but hunts him a little way, and after he has undergone a proper quantity of mangling, takes him into favour, through pure compassion passing off (ut mos est) into love. This august damsel is not very interesting to the heart; a goddess may act with boundless severity because she avenges offended godhead; but a mortal maid who deprives a mother of her babe because she has evaded the duty of giving three gallant gentlemen to death,' one of them her own brother, all for a capital crime of the lady potentate's own creation, must seem a kind of monster' to all the world, let a poet varnish her as he may. For poetry covers a multitude of transgressions; offences against history, chronology, geography, astronomy, zoology, with defiance of probability to an indefinite extent; but a violation of the laws of the heart it never can sanction or illustrate; it never can make fanaticism and inhumanity 'beautiful and fair.' The Princess is too soft to be terrible, and much too hard to be loveable; her talk is a strain of pompous pedantry; but from the haughtiness of her mind and corresponding loftiness of her person she forms a picturesque central object of the group. In the following description she reminds us of Dannecker's Ariadne:: 'She stood Among her maidens, higher by the head, This is a picture of her as seated to judge the intruders: "They haled us to the Princess where she sat Behold her again as she watches the combat: - 'I glanced to the left, and saw the palace-front With Psyche's babe, was Ida watching us- : It will be a relief to turn to Psyche and her child :'Back again we crost the court To Lady Psyche's: as we enter'd in, There sat along the forms, like morning doves A quick brunette, well moulded, falcon-eyed, It was a sweet thought to show the babe sleeping amid the pomp and glory of the scene, and all the high-toned lecturing and recitation, the elegies and odes 'With scraps of thund'rous Epic lilted out By violet-hooded Doctors.'-p. 42. Around this bright and gentle-hearted Lady Psyche hangs the chief interest of the piece, and all the most touching situations are those in which she is concerned. Her lecture is a pretty mockery of feminine pretensions to learning and argument: her interview with Florian is a pleasing mixture of the sportive and the tender; and her maternal emotions on losing and on regaining her babe are among those deeper passages of the poem which excite a regret that the whole is not more serious. The match made up between her and that wild youth Cyril is of doubtful propriety. Widows, however young, ought not to marry in romances :-but romances are mortal and fallible things, and we must take their beauties and their faults together and be thankful. The Senior Tutoress is described in some lines which we must call violent: : 'How might a man not wander from his wits Pierced thro' with eyes, but that I kept mine own How How should this painted mummy contrive to be the mother of the budding charmer thus sketched? 'Back started she, and turning round we saw In crystal currents of clear morning seas.'-p. 39. What a pity to break this pretty picture by that harsh stroke about the mother's faded hue!-and daffodils are not April guests, but 'take the winds of March with beauty.' The three gallant gentlemen we rather hear than see in the course of the poem: there is the enamoured Prince, who pleads eloquently for himself in his own supposed absence; the fraternal Florian, the Prince's 'shadow and half-self;' and Cyril, a gentleman of broken means (his father's fault),' who finds in the younger dowager one dear to his heart,' and, in the three castles her ladyship is possessed of, what is dear to his wants.' This youth is a sample of the modern school of breeding, which abounds more in admiration than in reverence. After hearing the college lecture, instead of being filled with awe and wonder, he breaks out thus to Florian : 'And much I might have said, but that my zone To break my chain, to shake my mane.' &c.-p. 44. 'They hunt old trails,' said Cyril, 'very well.-But when did woman ever yet invent?' His friend, the Prince, says of him, apologizing for his frolicsome song, 'These flashes on the surface are not he. He has a solid base of temperament : 'Tho' anchor'd to the bottom, such is he.'-p. 77. The second title of this lively performance points out its principal defect; it is a medley, and, we must think, a somewhat incongruous one. The fearless intermixture of the modes and phrases of all ages, past and present, is a resource better fitted for a brief jeu d'esprit than for a work of this compass-but that is not the worst. The main web of the tale is a gossamer fabric, and can ill ill sustain the heavy embroidery raised upon it; the low key at which it is pitched indisposes the mind for the higher strains to which the piece changes. A hero, 'blue-eyed and fair of face, with lengths of yellow ringlet like a girl,' who when he has tweezered out the slender blossom of manhood that lives on his lip and cheek,' passes well for a tall young lady, can hardly grow in the course of a few moons into a fitting mate for a magnificent Princess'Liker to the inhabitant Of some clear planet close upon the sun, Then he is so huffed and cuffed and disrespeckit,' so contumeliously treated and disprinced from head to heel,' that he never gains the dignity of a hero in the eyes of the reader. Again, the trifling and mockery of the earlier parts of the poem seem out of keeping with a triumphal hymn, in imitation of the Song of Deborah, Our enemies are fallen, are fallen,' and so on, after the style of the 'great dame of Lapidoth.' Perhaps no man has harmonized discordant elements, and brought matter for a smile into close connexion with matter of the heart, so successfully as Ariosto; but he was successful because these diverse materials were in some sort harmonized in his own mind from the first; he does not bring the tragic into collision with the comic, but fuses the two together, by an art fetched from the depths of his own individual nature. In his varied strain, Death wears light grey instead of sable robes; and Love, as you look on him, seems ever ready to turn into a gamesome Mercury: his torch flames fiercely, but it burns in the open air, and Mirth cools the atmosphere around by the fanning of his soft gauzy pinions. A strong unicorn is better than a feeble lion, and his poem, though Tasso declares him to have formed it quasi animal d'incerta natura, is by many (or most) preferred to the more regular Jerusalem Delivered.' we Another general remark we must venture to make; question whether in a tale so fanciful and impossible as The Princess,' a mixture of the supernatural is not almost required, not merely from our habits of association, because faëry and witchery have usually entered into the composition of stories of this cast, but because when we are taken out of the world we know and see about us, the mind looks for some intimation that we are carried into another, which has so far truth and reality, that it is a real product of the collective imagination of man, and has at least a subjective catholicity; without this we have an uncomfortable sensation, on entering the story, as if we were in no place and time at all, and had but a flooring of air to stand stand upon. If it be alleged that the world is weary of these fictions, this would be a reason for writing more soberly, and with a closer regard to the actual and the possible. At the risk of being condemned as obtuse by some, and hypercritical by others, we shall proceed to point out a few `minor defects which we seem to ourselves to perceive, not only in the present poem, but in the author's productions at large. The first we shall mention is an occasional absence of refinement, and failure of dignity and decorum. This does not amount to a moral fault, but we think it is a poetical one in performances of such a character as his, romantic and elevated, or gay and fanciful; for the grosser material, to the spectator's eye, passes into the other colours of the piece, and takes from that clear, bright, aërial effect, which it should be the writer's aim to produce. Instances of this we are not called upon to multiply. Let it suffice to hear the host of a wayside inn near Ida College tell the Prince and his companions, when anxious to proceed on their invading expedition 'No doubt that we might make it worth his while- His mean The second defect is an occasional want of clearness. ing is not always transparent through his diction as bottom agates through the crystal currents of clear morning seas.' We adduce, in proof of our own stupidity, possibly-the lines which describe the critical moment when Ida's heart is won to her prostrate lover : She turn'd; she paused; She stoop'd; and with a great shock of the heart And closed on fire with Ida's at the lips.'-p. 149. The shock of this meeting is communicated to the nerves of the reader, and not pleasantly. The last three lines are as obscure as the others are inharmonious: the passage is continued beautifully; it tells how · All Her falser self slipt from her like a robe, And |