person, and represents no kind of political, social, or economical
thinker. A man would give all other bliss and all his worldly wealth
for this, to waste his whole strength in one kick upon this perfect
prig. He employs the arguments of evolution and so forth to justify
the seduction of a little girl of fifteen, and later, by way of
making amends, proposes to commit incest by marrying her sister.
There have been evolutionists, to be sure, who believed in
promiscuity, like Mr Edgar, as preferable to monogamy. But this only
proves that an evolutionist may fail to understand evolution. There
be also such folk as Stevenson calls "squirradicals"--squires who say
that "the land is the people's." Probably no advocate of
promiscuity, and no squirradical, was present at the performances of
The Promise of May. But people of advanced minds had got it into
their heads that their doctrines were to be attacked, so they went
and made a hubbub in the sacred cause of freedom of thought and
speech. The truth is, that controversial topics, political topics,
ought not to be brought into plays, much less into sermons. Tennyson
meant Edgar for "nothing thorough, nothing sincere." He is that
venomous thing, the prig-scoundrel: he does not suit the stage, and
his place, if anywhere, is in the novel. Advocates of marriage with
a deceased wife's sister might have applauded Edgar for wishing to
marry the sister of a mistress assumed to be deceased, but no other
party in the State wanted anything except the punching of Edgar's
head by Farmer Dobson.

In 1883 died Edward FitzGerald, the most kind, loyal, and, as he
said, crotchety of old and dear Cambridge friends. He did not live
to see the delightful poem which Tennyson had written for him. In
almost his latest letter he had remarked, superfluously, that when he
called the task of translating The Agamemnon "work for a poet," he