all the philosophy and speculation of his prose is refined and sublimated into verse; and they look and sound the better for the change. But, after all, it is the same thing over again; not only would any reader acquainted with his numerous novels at once recognise the author, the resemblance is much closer; it not only betrays the same turn of mind, it says the same things, and images forth the same scenes. We could prove this by parallel passages, but space would not allow us to do so by examples numerous enough for our purpose. There is something in repetition, which perhaps gives the notion of poverty of invention more than it ought. An author may say the same thing a great many times, because he is struck with its importance, not because he has nothing else to say; but certainly this poem loses much by perpetually sending us back to where what is said in its pages was said for the first time, particularly where the thought has not become clearer by being retouched and dwelt upon. This is especially the case in the recurrence of Sir E. B. Lytton's most characteristic abstract speculations, what may be termed his Adverbial Philosophy. When the Far, the High, the Real, the Actual, the Here, the There, the Everywhere, which have haunted his prose so long, appear in their pristine vagueness in his verse, we are tempted to interrupt so much learning, and to inquire if we have not heard all this before? Nor is there much in the structure and harmony of the verse to atone for want of freshness in the thoughts. The language is always careful, the verse flowing, and often eloquent; all exhibits facility, and considerable power; it is the appropriate expression of an energetic and cultivated mind, but it wants the nameless, indescribable charms of poetry. The writers of poetical prose, indeed, do not often write poetical verse; with them the verse is only the translation of the prose, not that fresh coinage of the brain which does not exist at all till it starts into life complete in harmonious numbers. But we must leave preliminary remarks to enter upon the work, such as it is.

The author adduces with complacency, as he has reason to do, the examples of Milton and Dryden in support of his selection of a subject. But, with the utmost deference for these great men, we yet demur to the judiciousness of his choice. There is so much poetry in the name and traditions of the British Prince as might well suggest him as a fitting hero; but, on second and more deliberate thought, may his not have been found too shadowy and unreal an image for the mind to raise a great fabric upon? For, in truth, Arthur has been played with, and refined, and invested with new attributes and deprived of old ones, till it almost seems as if nobody ever did believe in him—as if he never had had an historical existence. The Troubadours who chose him as their hero discard every national or probable feature. They

make him and his knights exactly what suits them at the moment; so that he is now only thought of in conjunction with a state of society—the chivalrous-which had no existence in his day. It was a name, and no more, which they took, and made what they liked of. But in this false image set up and acknowledged, the idea of the true British monarch is irrecoverably lost. Judging from Dryden's proposed plan of celestial machinery, he must have designed to set aside the Arthur of popular fable, with his wizards and fairies, and to have recourse to something more probable--adventures which might sanction the proposed introduction of angels and dominions, the celestial guardians of nations, who contend in heaven while their several charges fight on earth. What Milton's Arthur would have been we presume not to guess, and the thought probably never took a very definite form; only we feel sure that he would not have been the Arthur of chivalry, for, while extolling his ultimate choice of subject, long choosing and beginning late;' he professes himself in a tone of contempt

may

as

The Arthur of the popular fancy is not a more real personage than King Oberon or King Cole; and perhaps it is this very freedom from all the trammels of fact, which has made him a favourite thought and theme with the poets-poets of such different ages and such various genius.

But too unlimited a freedom is really as little to be desired in art as in morals. Lacking all substantial reality, Sir E. B. Lytton's hero vacillates between extremes-alternately the prince of fairy land, with magic gifts and unearthly trials, and the man of the present day, acute, intelligent, well-informed: and this breach of what the critics quaintly call 'manners' in the hero, with whom it has still been the author's wish to observe them, is more conspicuous in the general conduct of the poem. It is, in fact, too often a masque; the personages are men of our own time, wearing the disguise of knights or ancient Britons, as the case may be; much as the fine ladies of the last century arrayed themselves in flowers and crooks, and, in spite of hoops and high-heeled shoes, called themselves Arcadian shepherdesses. In the author's elaborate portraits of the Knights of the Round Table, the reader's attention is entirely engaged in seeking for their originals in our army or the senate; and sometimes disguise is so completely thrown off, that it is evident the modern has forgotten to assume the gorgeous

habit of his part, and appears upon the stage in plain clothes. So it is with Ludovick, king of the Vandals, and his counsellor Astutio-in other words, Louis Philippe and Guizot. The introduction of this monarch is, indeed, as fatal to all illusion as was the appearance of the mouse in the fairy tale; the pretended princess did not more instantaneously change to her old feline form and nature, than does our poet into the eager politician at the scent of this outwitter of his house and name. Until we

have had the whole quarrel out, and have witnessed all the revenge that words can take, we are withheld from all thought or interest in the remote theme which professes to engage our attention. A dangerous experiment in the poet, as those far seeing glasses into the past, through which he would win one glance, are not easily or readily re-adjusted, when once their focus has been rudely disturbed.

For the reader's sake, however, we will arrange them to the best of our power, and give to those who have not yet read for themselves some insight into the fable.

Such as he is, then, our poet has chosen Arthur for his hero; and has taken the popular view of him as the head and founder of chivalry, with all chivalric symbols and accompaniments, rather than adhered to the few and faint glimpses of his historical character; and we will not quarrel with this decision; for the popular mind knows very little of British life under the Roman sway, and may have too barbarous a notion of an ancient Briton whom history from earliest childhood described to us as a very unsophisticated personage, but by no means a theme for heroic song. At the same time, he prefers keeping so far to probability as to confine his kingdom to South Wales, instead of suffering him to reign over the whole of Britain, according to the fabliaux. He considers, too, that by thus circumscribing his dominions he preserves his heroic dignity, as still in his descendants preserving what he originally held, instead of being ultimately dispossessed by the Saxon.

The scene opens in the Vale of Carduel, synonymous with Carleon, in the Usk, and supposed to be the capital of Arthur's dominions. This city is invested by the poet with an importance and a beauty, which, though somewhat beyond our notions of rigid truth, is allowable in the very shadowy realm of his romance. However, it seems that certain chroniclers attest to the 'gilded domes of Carduel,' and other signs of Roman civilization. In this vale the king keeps holiday. It is spring time-the poet's month of May-and knights and ladies rejoice in the glad season. The king at once shares and reasons upon the universal joy :

"Man," say our sages, "hath a fickle mind;
And pleasures pall, if long enjoy'd they be."

:

But I, methinks, like this soft summer-day,
'Mid blooms and sweets, could wear the hours away,
'Feel, in the eyes of love, a cloudless sun;

Taste, in the breath of love, eternal spring;
Could age but keep the joys that youth has won,
The human heart would fold its idle wing!
If change there be in Fate and Nature's plan,

Wherefore blame us?-It is in Time, not Man.'-P. 5.

And all the gay circle echoed, 'Time is but to blame.' When suddenly there gloomed upon the circle, the shade of some phantasmal thing,' which muttering from its spectral veil, (much after the fashion of that Dweller of the Threshold which haunts the pages of Zanoni,) summons the king away. Arthur rises

from his dream of pleasure, and follows the phantom within the thick shade of a neighbouring forest.

It was long before he reappeared, his countenance bearing traces of an unearthly conflict, with its pale features and involuntary shudderings; though repressed by kingly pride. Stedfastly refusing to give any account of his adventure, he returns with his discomfited train to the city. At midnight he rises from his sleepless couch, and walks out upon the walls of the city. There the lone taper shining from Merlin's tower strikes his eye, and at once he resolves to make the enchanter a sharer in his dread secret. We will give, in his own words, the author's description of the great magician: these possessors of unearthly knowledge are a favourite theme with him :

'45. Mutely the door slides sullen in the stone,

And closes back, the gloomy threshold cross'd;
There sat the wizard on a Druid throne,

Where sate Duw-Iou, ere his reign was lost;
His wand uplifted in his solemn hand,
And the weird volume on its brazen stand.

'46. O'er the broad breast the heavy brows of thought
Hung, as if bow'd beneath the load sublime
Of spoils from Nature's fading boundaries brought,
Or the dusk treasure-house of orient Time;
And the unutterable calmness shows

The toil's great victory, by the soul's repose.

'48. A hundred years press'd o'er that awful head,
As o'er an Alp, their diadem of snow;
And, as an Alp, a hundred years had fled,
And left as firm the giant form below;
So, in the hush of some Chaonian grove,
Sate the grey father of Pelasgic Jove.

49. Before that power, sublimer than his own,

With downcast looks, the king inclined the knee;
The enchanter smiled, and, bending from his throne,
Drew to his breast his pupil tenderly ;

And press'd his lips on that young forehead fair,

And with large hand smooth'd back the golden hair.'—P. 14. There is something in this parenthesis of the wizard— The young, perchance, are right,'-a little too commonplace and merely moral to suit our notions of the character; but, throughout, Merlin-of all antique conceptions the most ancient-has too much of the modern talker and philosopher about him. The author desires only to make him a sage--and a sage with him is a man of modern discoveries and ways of thought—so that he gives him none of the characteristics of one conversant with and master of the unseen demon world, a lore which must necessarily separate him from merely human instincts.

'Thrice sigh'd the monarch, and at length began:
"Can wisdom ward the storms of fate from man?
What spell can thrust affliction from the gate?
What tree is sacred from the lightning flame?"
"Son," said the seer, "the laurel!-even Fate,

Which blasts Ambition, but illumines Fame."-P. 15.

Arthur then reveals to the enchanter his mysterious adventure in the forest, where the phantom had led him to a black, sunless pool, and there shown him, as in a mirror, the miseries and final conquest of his race by the Saxon; accompanying this fatal pageant with words of gloomy prophecy. To this Arthur had replied in indignant despair, and the phantom vanished. The enchanter then has recourse to his magic arts, and there ensues a great turmoil of unseen spirits, which shakes the tower to its foundations, and casts Arthur into a swoon. When day returns he wakes, to find Merlin by his side with the mystic answer his charms have won. It is ordained that for one year the king must leave his kingdom, to wander forth alone in search of three gifts, by which alone the evil augury of the demon-pool can be averted. 'The Falchion, welded from a diamond gem, Hid in the Lake of Argent Music-Falls, Where springs a forest from a single stem, And moonlit waters close o'er Cuthite hallsFirst taste the herb that grows upon a grave, Then see the bark that wafts thee down the wave. 'The silver Shield in which the infant sleep

;

Of Thor was cradled-now the jealous care
Of the fierce Dwarf whose home is on the deep,
Where drifting ice-rocks clash in lifeless air
And War's pale Sisters smile to see the shock
Stir the still curtains round the couch of Lok.
'And, last of all-before the Iron Gate

Which opes its entrance at the faintest breath;
But hath no egress; where remorseless Fate

Sits weaving life, within the porch of Death;
Earth's childlike guide shall wait thee, in the gloom,
With golden locks, and looks that light the tomb.