19
the standard which is aimed at. But Sir Walter did not aim high—by no means too high for his object. His object was not to propound and disseminate, for countless centuries, swollen truths big enough to meet and satisfy the progressing demand of an ever increasing civilisation. He never taxed the elastic powers of his brain to such a dangerous extent. He had no inclination to utter anything beyond the reach of human intelligence. He filled up his canvas, and, we think, admirably well; but never to over-crowding. The colours were rich, and the proportions finely brought out. It was a good thing for Sir Walter, for Marmion, for us, that Jeffery was not at his ear as the tale flowed from his pen. Instead of a full, glowing, and correct picture of an age and its peculiar customs, we would have had a tale without interest or animation, a poem having greater faults than greater beauties, full of high-sounding airy nothings, vapid, pretentious, insipid, dull, and lifeless, like the Idylls of the King, in which, as Hume would have said, "there are twenty insipid conceits for one thought which is really beautiful." Mr Tennyson has a horror of animalism; and therefore he has eschewed details, for they would have brought his vapoury, floating, thoughts to the earth. Chivalry would have been nothing in the eyes of a simpering miss, if she had been told that an usual mark of gallantry on the part of a knight was to allow a lady fair the high privilage of eating from his plate. A privilege which, now-a-days, we regard as the special right of the lowest class of animals. Instead of heroic acts and disinterested deeds of daring, we would have had the puerilities and follies of a corrupt and profligate state of society. Mr Tennyson is too much infected with the refining tendency of the age to blunder in this direction; but it does not prevent
