the "butterbump" (dialect for bittern), the "yaffingale," and other birds. Many references are commonplaces in poetry, such as twenty or more to the "matin cock;" others, such as that in "The Daydream" to "long-tailed birds of Paradise," are too trivial to be noticed. The one weak point in Tennyson is his humor. Fitzgerald, his intimate friend, thought "Alfred's smile was a little grim," and we must admit that the humorous poem of "The Goose" is distinctly poor and below the poet's usual level, while a passage of similar tone about the hern in the "Idylls," rather fails of its mark.

But these points may be safely left for readers of Tennyson themselves to discover in order to give room in a paper already lengthy for some display of the many metaphors and similes besides those already quoted, which the poet has so often and so successfully introduced into his work.

His fondness for classical reminiscence has been touched on occasionally above. "The Princess" (iii., 81) supplies an elaborate instance of this. The passage:

crane,

Where now the seamew pipes, or dives In yonder greening gleam.

Wulfnoth in "Harold" complains in exile that he will not see England again, "Nor mark the sea-bird rouse himself and hover above the windy ripple, and fill the sky with free sea-laughter." Enoch Arden, on his solitary island, "Could not see the kindly human face, nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard the myriad shriek of wheeling oceanfowl." In "The Captain" the mouldering vessel, sunk with its crew beneath the waves, is only marked by "the lonely sea-bird" crossing "with one waft of wing."

The list of birds already enumerated does not anything like exhaust Tennyson's aviary. He mentions also the lintwhite, the marsh diver, the redcap,

The dove may murmur of the dove, but I An eagle clang an eagle to the sphere.

is clearly modelled on Theocritus (Idyll ix., 31):

Τέττιξ μὲν τέττιγι φίλος, μύρμακι δὲ μύρμαξ, Ιρηκες δ' ἔρηξιν· ἐμὶν δ ̓ ὁ Μῶσα καὶ ᾠδά. In "Pelleas and Ettarre" all talk dies away "As in a grove all song beneath the shadow of some bird of prey;" this might be paralleled from the "Ajax" of Sophocles (168 foll.), but so natural a metaphor need not be derived from any special source, except by the vampires, who hunt for coincidences. Again, in the "Idylls," Arthur's words shriek round Lancelot "like birds of prey." Scandal in "Merlin and Vivien" is a "foul bird of rapine." Death in "In

1 "There is, I fear, a prosaio set growing up amongst us, editors of booklets, bookworms, index hunters, or men of great memories and no imagination. . ."-Letter of Tennyson.

"Twere best at once to sink to peace,
Like birds the charming serpent draws,
To drop head-foremost in the jaws
Of vacant darkness and to cease.

The exquisite swallow image in the same poem has been noticed. There are others marked with the same rare gift of expression, which distinguishes every page of this fine elegy, such as:

My fancies tune to rise on wing And glance about the approaching sailsand:

In that solace can I sing,

Till out of painful phases wrought
There flutters up a happy thought,
Self-balanced on a lightsome wing.

The natural magic, which is the gift of few poets-Coleridge and Keats perhaps more than others-appears in the "Passing of Arthur," where the ghost of Gawain, to the echo of "hollow, hollow all delight," is wonderfully portrayed:

as Tennyson does, "sing like a bird and be happy," or make his heroine do anything so simple as fly "light as the shadow of a bird."

Two more instances where the felicity of the image strikes one as much as its absolute truth and naturalness will serve to conclude this paper. In "The Gardener's Daughter," surely the progenitor of many delightful books, which have recently brought back some of the charm of the "happy Garden-state" to a busy world, one of the bridal party says:

We listen'd; with the time we play'd, We spoke of other things; we coursed about

The subject most at heart more near and

near,

Like doves about a dovecote wheeling round

The central wish, until we settled there.

And in "The Princess" the man masked as woman must

Abate the stride which speaks of man, and loose

range

Their season in the night, and wail their way

From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream

Shrilled.

The common herd of men are "wild hearts and feeble wings that every sophister can lime." In "Harold" (Act i., Scene 2), in a passage too long to quote, Edith and Harold play on the lovelorn nightingale. The gentle and simple maid Elaine:

murmur'd "Vain, in vain: it cannot

be.

He will not love me: how then? must I die?"

Then as a little helpless innocent bird, That has but one plain passage of few

notes,

Will sing the simple passage o'er and o'er For all an April morning, till the ear Wearies to hear it, so the simple maid Went half the night repeating, "Must I die?"

The modern elaborate bard and imitator, who is not a "poet" or maker, in

Will wonder why they came.

Tennyson may be limited in range, a Callimachus rather than a Homer, at times over-elaborate in expression (and nowadays roughness is often mistaken for strength), but such passages as these show him a true poet, no weaver of artificial and artistic word-mosaic, and safely grapple him to the hearts of English men and women as the laureate

of our English familiar birds.

EDGAR VALDES.

From The Fortnightly Review. THE TWENTIETH ITALIAN PARLIAMENT. If Romeo, instead of seeking death with Juliet, shook hands with all the Capulets over her grave, and if Hamlet, instead of avenging his father, said, "all that is is best," and hobnobbed with his

uncle, the impression produced on playgoers would be akin to that which observers must feel at seeing the results of the Italian elections after the tragedies and national furies of last spring. The disinterested spectator is divided between his sense of disappointment, and his irritation at bathos, and at the inability of a nation to rise to the height of a strong situation. It is true that at no time is a general election in Italy any assured indication of national sentiment, that at no time is it a thing which widely and profoundly moves popular feeling; the people have as a whole the habit of standing aloof from it and leaving it to the wire-pullers. The populace, as a whole, mistrust the urns and view them much as the rabbit views the trap. When I urged one of my servants the other day to use his vote, he stubbornly replied, "I have never done anything to compromise myself yet, and now I am fifty years old I shall not begin;" and I may remark that he is what we call in polite modern phrase "educated;" he reads many newspapers and knows French enough to think Bourget dull. His view of political duty is one which is very general in Italy; the franchise is regarded either with contempt as a fiction or with suspicion as, in some indescribable manner, a trick of the police to get people into trouble; the latter is a very common idea, especially amongst rustic populations. With such an impression as this general amongst many classes, we shall soon see that the proportion of those who vote is, compared to the population, very small indeed, when we remember the many tens of thousands forbidden by the Church to vote at political elections, and the many other millions excluded from the franchise by not knowing their alphabet, and the many persons of all grades who voluntarily austain from voting on account of their conviction that "plus ce change plus c'est la même chose." Italian elections cannot, therefore, be considered in any way indicative of national feeling; the great majority of the nation is dumb, and does not even make a sign. Public meeting, which is understood and would

be frequent, is always interfered with and prohibited by government as the meetings "pro Candia" are being forbidden and hindered in this current month. For all these reasons parliamentary returns in Italy are not, and never can be as long as the present régime lasts, even approximate indications of popular feeling, without here speaking of that interference by the Palazzo Braschi and its prefects, which will never cease so long as the present forms of monarchical government endure.

There is also another weight which lies like lead on popular opinion, and pushes it out of its straight course as the internal organs of a body may be pushed out of place by a tumor growing upon one of them,-the franchise permitted to be exercised by the bureaucracy, by all impiegati (Civil servants), from the greatest to the lowest. The bureaucracy votes to a man for the government, and causes that invariable majority of government which so astonishes English writers for the press at every general election in Italy. The Italian populace has a saying that "for every man there are five impiegati,” and it is the fact. The enormous, odious and almost entirely useless Civil Service is kept up at its present ruinous proportions for the sake of the instrument which lies at hand in it for the government to use at election time all over the country; and, whatever this government may be, it does and it will so use it. It will, therefore, be seen, by mere reflection on these facts, that an election must ever be, under the present régime, a most doubtful and partial representation of Italian national feeling, and it is, perhaps, wonderful that under such conditions even so much free choice has been successfully exercised as the late election has allowed. Still, recalling the emotion which the country felt only one year ago, its disgust, its wrath, its humiliation, one would have hoped that it would have burst its bonds on this occasion, and sent up a very different choice of men as its representatives to Montecitorio. It is true that the Crispini have

been defeated and consigned to the dungeon of private life. But there is no assurance that Crispinism (or something very like it) will not be developed in the many gentlemen of the majority of whom the vague description given to their electors is that they are "monarchical," an elastic term which generally means in them a lively sense of the side on which their bread is buttered.

Five men were responsible for the madness and carnage and ruin in Erythrea. Those five were Crispi, Baratieri, Mocenni, Sonnino, and the king. Of these, Crispi, Mocenni, and Sonnino keep their seats; Baratieri receives a pension (exactly calculated with graceful gratitude to give him a franc per head for every soldier who fell in the campaign he conducted), and the king-the king, of course, dwells in the white tent of royal intangibility and must not be arraigned. All the authors, therefore, of the late senseless and wicked war, with its irreparable waste of life and treasure and national honor, go scot-free, and one at least of them (Sonnino) will certainly, if he live and the present institutions last, be first minister of Italy some time or other. Now, what is the lesson taught to the people by such immunity in high places? It is a lesson which the lowest can understand, and which is of the worst kind.

And it was the general sense that it was wholly useless to try and seek to chastise those in alto for the misery they had brought on Italy which has caused so much apathy in the public at large at the recent elections. The most courageous man gets tired of straining at a rope which is fastened to an immovable rock. It is impossible, as I have said, to tell what the Chamber may prove to be; candidates call themselves Monarchists to get governmental support in their election, and, when their seats are safe, may show themselves something quite different to their previous professions; as a Republican or Radical may, on the other hand, be tempted to join in the scramble for the loaves and fishes, and may throw off his jacket of Liberalism to get foremost in

the fray. But it can scarcely be doubted that there will be a strong effort of the majority at reactionism; and reaction, however personally Crispi may be disgraced or set aside, will be Crispinism.

Those who are the best judges of the direction of the political currents of Montecitorio are, it is true, of opinion that, despite the nominal Conservative majority, the temper of the Chamber will be strongly and chiefly democratic. I should be disposed to doubt this; it is, however, quite certain that if the Marquis di Rudini wishes not to forfeit the reputation he has hitherto borne as a galantuomo, he must, to be true to the faith which was reposed in him a year since, cease to dally with the Crispini, and turn for his allies rather to that Extreme Left without whose support he would not now be in office.

Throughout the past year Crispi has been eclipsed, but Crispinism has been rife; the hand has been the hand of Esau, but the voice the voice of Jacobat least, in internal policy. The boys are arrested in the fields and streets for singing the hymn of labor; the clubs are closed, the societies are dissolved, the newspapers are sequestered, the editors are imprisoned; a soldier ventures to beg redress for injustice of the monarch, he is seized, put under arrest, declared afflicted with the mania of persecution; it is all pure Crispinism; it may be called something else, but its essence is Crispinism. Nor do I believe that the present régime will ever be anything else de facto, whatever it may be de jure.

If Rudini had consented to the impeachment and trial of Crispi and his colleagues a year ago, Crispinism might have been destroyed; at all events, the present year would have been spared the present renewal and recrudescence of scandal in the Favilla trial, in the renewed patronage of the Quirinal, at such a juncture, of Crispi, in Crispi's "defence," that he took the moneys but spent them on the elections, and in the interposition of the highest influence to save him from public exposure and formal examination. For a whole

twelvemonth and more this scandal has been the common gossip in every market-place, wine-house, gambling den, piazza, and cattle show. The imagination of the public runs riot over it. The effect on public morality is a million times worse than any open trial, than any blunt exposures, would have been, no matter whom those might have compromised. The people see the smoke, and see the efforts made to extinguish it; their fancy conjures up ten devils dancing in the smothered flames, where perhaps only one may be. The Marquis di Rudini was entreated by his warmest well-wishers to cause those scandals to be fully investigated, which only the impeachment of the outgoing ministry could have done. He preferred to smother them, or did so in deference to a will which he considered he was bound to obey. They have smouldered on all through these twelve months, and have now burst out afresh, perhaps to be afresh forcibly smothered. His administration may, perhaps, have been prolonged in duration by this leniency and complacency; it has certainly been weakened in character. It has become Crispiniate-tainted with the taint of an

incorrect indulgence.

The populace roughly reads the lesson set before it when it sees or hears of Francesco Crispi, still wearing his collar of the Santissima Annunziata, taking his accustomed seat at the opening of the twentieth legislative assembly, allowed to kiss the hand of the queen in the face of the senators and deputies, and permitted to lead her to the tribune.

With the lamentable weakness and reactionism of which the past twelve months, in utterance and action, have been full, the royal speech was a document which might have been penned for a Neapolitan Bourbon or a Lorraine Hapsburg. It leaves on the mind of any unbiassed hearer or reader of it the same sense of bathos, and of painfully visible inability to even vaguely comprehend the dangers and necessities of the times, which we feel before the results of the elections. There is nothing in it from the first phrase to the last ex

cept empty vanities of personal pomp which suggest, as some one said at Montecitorio, that it was written for us by friend William at Potsdam. The most common tact should have prevented such a speech being put into the mouth of an Italian sovereign, who is almost as much a monarch by election as were the kings of Poland, and who should be bidden to recall that fact himself to avert having it rudely recalled to him.

"Il regno d'Italia," says an Italian political writer, "venne Constituito dai plebisciti che furono un contratto fra la nazione e il principato, e il rapporto fra i due Contraenti è la rapresentazione nazionale. Il governo è quello, dell' Italia, e in Italia vi sono non i sudditi ma i cittadini dei plebisciti."

In

Italians are not "subjects," they are citizens who gave a free vote for a monarchy. It is an insult to the nation and an ill service to the sovereign to put into his mouth dictatorial, pompous, and autocratic phrases unjustified by history and constitutional law. equal bad taste and incorrect measure are the allusions to the "valor" of the army and the "unity" of the nation! Indeed, the whole discourse resembles more an elaborate satire than anything else, and its omissions are as remarkable as its assertions. The defeat of Abba Carima seems already wiped from the slate. The army, we are told, is the pride and the safety of the people! It was painful to hear this preposterous piece of bombast spoken in that city where Scipio Africanus once silenced his foes with the one word "Zama!"

The twentieth Parliament was also on its opening day made painfully conspicuous by the evidence of the Marquis di Rudini's desire to be on cordial terms with Sonnino, and to give him a seat on the ministerial bench. It is surely clear that if the nation wanted Sonnino it would have kept him when it had him, and if a year ago Rudini was called to turn him and his colleagues out of office, it was not to copy their administration and enlist their services in his own. It would seem as if twelve months had been a term long enough to