Have I climb'd back into the primal church,
And stand within the porch, and Christ with me:
My flight were such a scandal to the faith,
The downfall of so many simple souls,
I dare not leave my post.

PETER MARTYR.

But you divorced

Queen Catharine and her father; hence, her hate Will burn till you are burned.

CRANMER.

I cannot help it.

The Canonists and Schoolmen were with me.

Thou shalt not wed thy brother's wife."—"Tis written,

have been, horrible as it certainly was. When Tennyson puts into his canting mouth,

"The Canonists and Schoolmen were with me,"

he is again historically wrong, for he knows they were not, and no man knew that better than Cranmer. The hypocrisy of the latter began with his consecration, and ended only in his death. On the very day of his investiture "he withdrew into a cor

But France would not accept her for a bride
As being born from incest; and this wrought
Upon the king; and child by child, you know,
Were momentary sparkles, out as quick
Almost as kindled; and he brought his doubts
And fears to me. Peter, I'll swear for him
He did believe the bond incestuous.

This is an upright, sincere, devoted churchman, clearly understanding the doctrine which he preaches, abiding by its dogmas with the persistence of a hero, and rejoicing that the martyr's palms are soon to be passed into his grasp. No such man was the Cranmer who, sacrificing everything,-honor, religion, theology, even personal decency, in order to remain an officeholder of the king, proved the stumbling-block of England and the Judas of the English Catholic Church. The Cranmer who connived at the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was a cowardly, avaricious hypocrite, whom even Macaulay characterizes as an "unscrupulous time-server." Had he possessed the physical, to say nothing of the moral, courage of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, he would have shared their glorious fate, and the king would have had to look for another chaplain. His hypocrisy and cowardice merely postponed his fate, unjust as it may

Cran

what he was going publicly to swear in regard of his obedience to the See of Rome." After this perjury, he asks Henry to give him authority to divorce the king from his lawful wife; and when this burlesque had been carried out, he confirmed Henry's marriage with Anne, which had taken place four months before the divorce. As for the universities and schoolmen, not one of the latter who was respectable placed himself on the king's side, notwithstanding the unabashed bribery which the royal agents employed all over Europe; and, after a bribe of two millions of crowns to the King of France, the pretended assent of the University of Paris was secured by barefaced fraud, and the answers of the dissenting universities were suppressed. mer's cowardice and hypocrisy, as well as the inaccuracy of Mr. Tennyson, are further shown by the conduct of the archbishop at the time of and after his arrest. The poet intends that the reader shall believe Cranmer is sent to the Tower for his religion. The undisputed fact is that he was sent there for signing the patent which settled the crown on Lady Jane Grey, a political offence which would constitute high treason in any monarchy then or now. When sentenced to death, the coward and hypocrite were both so strong in him that, to save his life, he expressed a willingness to renounce the doctrines of the Reformation. Tennyson, later in the poem, makes a partial attempt to exhibit Cranmer's vacillation, but

only for the purpose of strengthening the man in the final scene.

It is true that Cranmer was executed nominally for heresy and not for treason, but the change was made in order to subject him to the same barbarity which, under the previous reign, he had been the means of visiting upon others. We do not excuse the manner of his death, nor defend the cruelties of Mary's reign; these are without defence. But it is assuredly obligatory to remember that Mary only copied the example left by her father, whose conduct Cranmer always approved; and that the savage penalties inflicted under her administration were not of her invention. They had been chiefly patented by her Protestant father, and whatever additional ones were contributed in her name were deliberately enacted by a Parliament of Englishmen, and carried out by ministers, who were inspired by their hates, revenges, greed, and ambition, not by love for God or anxiety to advance the interests of the Church which their conduct disgraced. Tennyson is again disingenuous when he misrepresents Mary as solicitous for the death of Lady Jane Grey for heresy. Lady Jane, with a bravery of which Cranmer was incapable, mounted the scaffold on account of having accepted the offer of the crown of England while the diadem rested on a legitimate head. The responsibility of her death rests upon her father, her husband, and their co-conspirators.

The character of Mary, as outlined by Mr. Tennyson, is unkindly, if not viciously, overdone. It is a fashion in England now, set by Mr. Gladstone, to paint in as hideous hues as possible everything and everybody, past or present, accusable of friendly leaning toward Rome; and Mr. Tennyson, while giving us a piece of portraiture dubbed "Elizabeth," which quite surpasses the flattering presentment of that royal woman so laboriously accomplished by Mr.

Froude, is at great pains to make Mary a little better than a brute in certain respects, and merely brutal in many others.

The unimpassioned truth is that Mary possessed more of her father's good traits than Elizabeth did; she was far more womanly in domestic affairs, and her worst enemies never found cause for staining with slander her unimpeached name. She loved one man profoundly and purely, and she loved him to the day of her death, notwithstanding his indifference, neglect, and actual desertion. Elizabeth, on the contrary, loved no man truly, and we do not propose to discuss here the quality of affection which conflicting historians predicate of her friendship toward a large number of different men. Elizabeth was Mary's superior in masculine executiveness; she had better counsellors; the people were more united; there was less horror among the masses over the constant application of monstrous penalties for religious offences; the relations of England with foreign powers were more advantageous; and her long reign enabled her, under so favoring circumstances, to make up a record of administrative success, beside which Mary's brief reign appears insignificant. But in making a parallel between the personal characters of the two queens, Mr. Tennyson commits, subjectively, the curious fault of anticipating the summed-up results of the respective reigns, and then applies them, with the discrimination of a partisan, to the differentiation of their individual characters. The fact is that, as women and as queens, they had many excellent and many coarse traits in common, and they drew them from the same Tudor well. Both women were the natural products of the age in which they lived. Both participated in a barbarous code of life-taking for political and creed offences. But of the two, Mary's character is the more amiable. In cruelty she was far outdone by Elizabeth. The death of Lady

Jane Grey was unavoidable under the law; but Elizabeth defied and outraged law in the slaughter of Mary Queen of Scots.

Neither is to be held wholly responsible for the excesses committed under royal approval, for neither equalled their father in ingenuity or heartlessness of cruelty, but Elizabeth certainly came the nearer to him. Nevertheless the poet insists that Queen Mary was capable of everything devilish; and that Elizabeth was a paragon of beauty, studiousness, sincerity, and virtue. We protest that mankind are too disinterested to tolerate upon the stage, or to read without disgust and indignation, so manifest an injustice as that which, for mere bigotry and the clapping of bigot's hands, makes of one cruel but successful queen a heroine and a saint, and of another queen, far less cruel and utterly unfortunate, an imbecile and a fiend.

We have not space to follow Mr. Tennyson's prejudices into their tortuous byways of minor personages. Enough to say that he rarely misses an opportunity to exalt the Protestant and defame the "Papist.

We have already ventured to affirm that Queen Mary cannot be successful, in its present form, as a drama. There are dozens of better dramatic poems lying dusty on library shelves, which the generous craft of the most skilful playwrights has failed to get upon the stage, or to keep there after a first public attempt. The plays which the people go to see and hear, are those which, no matter when they were written or by whom, are adapted, in truthfulness of conception and practical construction, for stage enactment. Had Shakspeare been merely a poet, he would no doubt have written great poems, and possibly dramas; but his Hamlet and his Shylock would have been read, not acted. The unequalled talent of the playwright was an integral part of his splendid genius as a poet; and it was this

extraordinary mental combination which has kept his plays green and fresh upon the stage, while, on the one hand, the poems of a Milton, and, on the other, the plays of even so admirable dramatists, as Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, are alike only read, and the number of their readers does not increase. Nobody would think of ranking Tennyson with Milton as a poet; still less is he entitled to be placed on a par with Jonson as a dramatist. He is a better poet than Bulwer; and yet Richelieu will always stride the boards; and a more successful litterateur than Lalor Sheil; but Evadne will be listened to and gazed upon with delight, even after the name of its gallant young author shall alone survive his other literary toil. In fact, Queen Mary possesses very few essentially histrionic properties.

"The real object of the drama," as Macaulay says, "is the exhibition of human character," and Mr. Tennyson fails in this, because his prejudices and interest have misled him into misrepresentation and favoritism. After committing this fundamental falsity, he thrusts so large a crowd of persons upon the stage that the bewildered spectator is at once fatigued, and a play which produces fatigue furnishes its own death. Queen Mary contains no less than forty-five distinct personages, besides troops, retainers, lords, members of the privy council, aldermen, peasants, ushers, pages, and members of Parliament. This excess is best appreciated by comparison: Hamlet contains less than half as many; the Merchant of Venice, the same as Hamlet; Macbeth employs twenty-two persons; Much Ado about Nothing eighteen; All's Well that Ends Well fourteen; As You Like It twenty-one; Lear nineteen; Othello thirteen; while of Shakspeare's longest plays, King John contains twenty-two, Richard the Third twenty-eight, Julius Cæsar thirty

one, Henry VIII twenty-eight; and all of these are invariably and, indeed, necessarily, "cut." Mr. Tennyson commits another fatal blunder in requiring the stage-manager to shift the scenes too often. Queen Mary is composed of five acts. The first is diluted into five scenes, the second into four, the third into six, the fourth into three, and the fifth into five-in all, twenty-three.

The best drama which poetic genius can contrive, could not triumphantly withstand such dilution, unless it abound in climaxes of the most sensational sort, and Queen Mary is quite as free from " sensations" as is all the rest of Mr. Tennyson's writing, except Enoch Arden. It contains no "situations;" never raises expectation; and while it is not Greek in its plan, its details possess none of the telling "points" of the modern drama, whether represented by Shakspeare or Boucicault.

There are, indeed, stirring passages, which, in the hands of clever players, would thoroughly interest a sympathetic audience. For instance, Scene V of the first act, in which Mary, at the outset, discusses Philip of Spain successively with her waitingmaid Alice, with Gardiner, Noailles, the French ambassador, Renard, the ambassador from Spain, and, at the close, wins from her council a reluctant consent to her marriage. This is the strongest scene in the drama; it is long, but the temper is evenly maintained. The third scene of the third act, in which the Papal absolution is read, is impressive, and will probably prove picturesque if put on the boards; but its termination is weak. The final scene of the last act represents the Queen's death. She writes to her absent husband, whom she has never ceased to love with a fervor to which he was incapable of

She points to his picture on the wåll:

MARY.

"Doth he not look noble!

I had heard of him in battle over seas,
And I would have my warriors all in arms.
He said, it was not courtly to stand helmeted
Before the queen. He had his gracious moments,
Altho' you'll not believe me. How he smiles
As if he loved me yet!"

In a paroxysm of rage, remembering his infidelities, she cuts out the picture, casts it, with a taunt, upon the floor, and then wails:

"O God, I have killed my Philip !”

She hears a cry of "Elizabeth!" on the street, and exclaims :

"What's that? Elizabeth? Revolt?
A new Northumberland? Another Wyatt?
I'll fight it on the threshold of the grave!"

She departs from the stage to die, and the natural climax is aborted, in order-strange incongruity-to permit the proclamation of Elizabeth as queen.

As to the literary merits of Queen Mary, aside from its historical truth, or its effectiveness as a drama, there will be a diversity of opinion. Detached portions of the poem display a manlier sweep than that which characterizes Mr. Tennyson's usual work; there are passages of angry dispute, as between Gardiner and Pole, for instance, which are marked by a sustained vigor that closely resembles what the London Times meant by dramatic fire. The polish of style and daintiness of phrasing, which render Enoch Arden a perfect piece of verbiage, is lacking; and one misses the tiny lyrics which are so enticing a feature of The Princess. Two little songs are introduced, that of the Milkmaid, in the third act, which is Tennysonian in its musical lack of meaning; and this tender plaint by the Queen, in the second scene of the last act—

MARY (sings):

"Hapless doom of woman happy in betrothing! Beauty passes like a breath, and love is lost in loathing: