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not to cease until all beauty and vigour had left the body, only to mark more vividly the decadence of what was once so admirable. The ennobling impulses disappeared before a degenerate love. The thoughts which drew men out of themselves were swamped in the stagnate pool of unhealthy pleasures. And then chivalry was lost to view. It is this chivalry which Mr Tennyson has decently and becomingly attired in the fashion of the present day, after the necessary ablutions were performed in private under his careful and exacting surveillance. We commend Mr Tennyson's prudence, although we cannot praise his judgment. Nor can we pass over the folly of clothing Arthur in the vesture, and surrounding him with the customs and manners, of the twelfth century, when it is said he lived in the beginning of the sixth. Instead of fighting like a savage, Arthur, by this transposition, prays like a saint. Yet for him Alban had died in vain. The shouts which lauded the preaching of Germanus and Lupus had ceased to reverberate throughout the land. Neo-Druidism was rampant. Pagan temples stood on the sites of the cathedrals of Canterbury, Westminster, and St Paul. For Arthur, Augustine preached and Cedmon sung in vain. Arthur and all his knights knew as much about the "holy vessel of Sangreal," as about the Koran or the Fisherman's Ring; more about a wild boar than a Pater Noster. No doubt the waves which brought the first seeds of Christianity had broken on the shores of England ere this time. But the fruit had only been gathered of that portion which sprang up quickly. That other portion which had been deeply sown, which was to blossom and bear much fruit, had not as yet opened into life,—that portion from whose luxuriance was to be gathered the seed which was to be wafted to every shore, so that every people and nation might taste the
