her at her own and Cyril's supplication. The mother in vain calls up the remembrance of their past love, and implores forgiveness; in vain the old King her father rates her soundly; and the father of the Prince tells her that his son will be in greater safety in the camp than under her changeful and capricious power:

"The rougher hand

Is safer. On to the tents! Take up the Prince."

But at last signs of relenting are seen in the countenance of Ida; and the genial light of love shone through glittering drops upon her friend's sadness:

"Come hither,

O, Psyche!" she cried out; "Embrace me: come
Quick while I melt. Make reconcilement sure
With one that cannot keep her mind an hour:
Come to the hollow heart they slander so!
Kiss and be friends, like children being chid;
I seem no more: I want forgiveness too:

I should have had to do with none but maids,

That have no links with men. Ah! false but dear,
Dear traitor too much loved; why?-why?-Yet see
Before these kings we embrace you yet once more
With all forgiveness, all oblivion,

And trust not love you less.

She then proposes to tend the wounded Prince herself, beseeching his aged father's permission, and to dismiss her maiden-band to their own homes till happier times. Other ladies petition in like manner for other lovers, till Ida beholds all her chaste laws broken, and has also to bear the sarcasms of Lady Blanche.

But Ida with a voice, that like a bell

Toll'd by an earthquake in a trembling tower,
Rang ruin, answer'd full of grief and scorn.

And, in despite of the she-Solon and her taunts, she is provoked to order the doors to be opened to receive all the wounded.

Fling our doors wide! all, all, not one, but all,

Not only he, but, by my mother's soul,

Whatever man lies wounded, friend or foe,
Shall enter, if he will.

The hall was soon thronged with soldiers, the marble floor shrieking under their iron heels.

In the centre stood

The common men with rolling eyes; amazed
They glared upon the women, and aghast
The women stared at these, all silent, save
When armour clashed or jingled, while the day,
Descending, struck athwart the hall, and shot
A flying splendour out of brass and steel, &c.

The Maiden College is now turned to a hospital.

A kindlier influence reigned; and every where
Low voices with the ministering hand

Hung round the sick the maidens came, they talk'd,
They sang, they read: till she not fair, began

To gather light, and she that was, became

Her former beauty treble; and to and fro
With books, with flowers, with Angel offices,
Like creatures native unto gracious act,

And in their own clear element, they moved.

Ida, from failure of her plans, and consciousness and shame of her weakness, is solitary and sad, while the Prince, on his bed of pain,

Lay silent in the muffled cage of life.

*

Star after star arose, and fell, but I

Lay sunder'd from the moving universe,

Nor knew what eye was on me, nor the hand

That nursed me, more than infants in their sleep.

But the patients as they recover fall in love, as is quite natural and common, with their nurses. First Florian feels the tender arrow at his heart, and no wonder, for it is feathered by the poet in the sweetest and most attractive colours, and so adieu now to all mild denials, and tender scorns, and sweet repulses ; for

A light of healing glanced about the couch,
Or thro' the parted silks the tender face
Peep'd, shining in upon the wounded man

With blush and smile, a medicine in themselves,

To wile the length from languorous hours, and draw
The sting from pain: nor seem'd it strange that soon

He rose up whole, and those fair charities

Join'd at her side, nor stranger seem'd that hearts
So gentle, so employ'd, should close in love,
Than when two dewdrops on the petal, shake

To the same sweet air, and tremble deeper down,
And slip at once all-fragrant into one.

Cyril's courtship of Psyche is not quite so prosperous, but is at length successful. Last comes that of the Prince and of Ida. Opposition has dropped his hands. The two old kings, the brothers, even Arac himself, acknowledge and feel the Prince's claims; but the Prince is a little delirious, and Ida does not very well know how to take his conduct; but at length, from the union of certain causes,

A closer interest flourished up

Tenderness touch by touch, and last, to these,
Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears
By some cold morning glacier; frail at first
And feeble, all unconscious of itself,

But such as gather'd colour day by day.

Reason returns, but accompanied with weakness even to death. He wakes, and by the faint evening light sees on the painted walls two grand designs, such as he of Florence might have designed.

On one side arose

The women up in wild revolt, and storm'd

At the Oppian law. Titanic shapes, they cramm'd
The forum, and half-crush'd among the rest

A little Cato cower'd. On the other side
Hortensia spoke against the tax; behind,
A train of dames: by axe and eagle sat,

With all their foreheads drawn in Roman scowls,
And half the wolf's-milk curdled in their veins,
The fierce triumvirs; and before them paused
Hortensia, pleading.

Now we are arrived at the important crisis of the poem, for Ida is sitting by the couch of the afflicted Prince in tears of compassion and love. He fixed his faint eyes on her and said—

"If you be, what I think you, some sweet dream,

I would but ask you to fulfil yourself;
But if you be that Ida whom I knew

I ask you nothing;-only, if a dream,

Sweet dream be perfect. I shall die to-night.
Stoop down and seem to kiss me ere I die."'

I could no more, but lay like one in trance
That hears his burial talk'd of by his friends,
And cannot speak, nor move, nor make one sign,
But lies and dreads his doom. She turn'd; she paus'd;
She stoop'd; and with a great shock of the heart,
Our mouths met. Out of languor leapt a cry,
Crown'd passion from the brinks of death, and up
Along the shuddering senses struck the soul,
And closed on fire with Ida's at the lips;
Till back I fell, and from mine arms she rose
Glowing all over noble shame; and all
Her falser self slipt from her like a robe,
And left her woman, lovelier in her mood
Than in her mould that other, when she came
From barren deeps to conquer all with love,
And down the streaming crystal dropt, and she
Far-fleeted by the purple island-sides,
Naked, a double light in air and wave,

To meet her Graces, where they deck'd her out
For worship without end.

Waking in the night, the Prince sees Ida sitting beside him, with a volume of poetry in her hand, and she reads aloud two simple, sweet, and classical songs, the first of which ends with these lines

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake;
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom, and be lost in me.

A second is found and recited. Its harmony flows in such terms as these

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height;
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang)
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?
But cease to move so near the heavens, and cease
To glide, a sunbeam, by the blasted pine,

To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;
And come, for Love is of the valley, come,
For Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him.

But come for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I,
Thy shepherd, pipe; and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Ida owns the folly and rashness of her favourite enterprise, and that she had made herself a "queen of farce." The Prince consoles her; desires her not to blame herself too much; and reads her a philosophical lectures on the relative duties and powers of the two sexes. His eloquence, GENT. MAG. VOL. XXIX.

S

progress of the narrative, and the events, than in the persons who are found in it. The incidents, rather than the characters, take our attention. We cannot sympathize with the Princess, because we cannot agree with her opinions, or approve her practice. She is to us a frozen woman throughout, and when she thaws at last, we should have liked a little more heat and more water. The Prince is delightful when he is urging his love in pathos, and delicate sighs, and sparkling tears; but he ought to have fought better and his rescuing Ida from the waters is scarcely enough to sustain the princely nobility of conduct and character we expect him to have. Arac should not have conquered him so easily. Both in petticoats and breeches he is a little too effeminate, liking too much "the silken dalliance" of peace and love; and, being in bed all the latter part of the poem, he might have been, as the Radicals say, "up and stirring" in the former part. Arac also is only to us a name; we know nothing of him, nor can we represent him to ourselves in any form of distinctness. Lady Blanche is very good in the way of contrast, which was necessary; and for the same reason we like Cyril," whose character, and that of the bald old King, give a dramatic spirit to the story. Taken as a whole, we must pronounce it a beautiful poem, the production of a truly poetical mind, and showing the most indisputable marks of a high artistical power, superintending the creation, and arrangement, and classification of the whole; so that from his fine natural genius, and the judicious and careful culture it appears to have received, we shall hereafter expect from Mr. Tennyson not only such as we have already had from him—" thoughts that breathe, and words that burn"--but creations of a higher kind, where Fancy, instead of reigning alone and supreme in her own enchanting dominion, is content to submit herself to a still greater power, and be a ministering and willing handmaid, happy to adorn and beautify the temple of living truth, where are assembled the affections, passions, interests, and actions, in all their changeful and conflicting progress through the social system of the present world, which poetry has but to enter, and she may make her last and latest domain the richest she has ever possessed.

66

neque enim robustior Ætas
Ulla, nec uberior, nec quæ magis audeat, ulla est.

STRYPE, THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORIAN.

MR. URBAN, Jan. 12. IN the course of my remarks upon the Works of our ecclesiastical historian Strype, which were printed in your last Magazine, I took occasion to state that, though the University of Oxford thought proper to reprint them without revision or correction, they yet stand in need of a very continuous application of editorial castigation, and I added that "He is frequently incorrect in his copies of documents, occasionally injudicious in his references, and sometimes even mistaken in his statements of facts.".

These allegations I now beg to prove by some remarkable instances occurring in the First and Second volumes

of the Ecclesiastical Memorials: to which I may, perhaps, with your permission, add something further hereafter.

At p. 147 of the First volume of the Memorials (p. 226 of the Oxford edition) Strype introduces a remarkable paper which he describes as "A discourse now framed and published, or to be published, in the King's name, to justify his appeal from the Pope, and to vindicate himself to the people." This is derived from the Cottonian volume, Cleopatra E. vI. where the original is preserved with this endorsement: "By what aucthoritie and howe generall counseills may be called." It is in fact an argument intended to