"Lit white streams of dazzling gas,"


like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.


"Thus her intense, untold delight,
In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound,
Was flattered day and night."


Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter's experiments in gas, the "smell"
gave him no "deep, untold delight," and his "infamous review" was
biassed by these circumstances.

The volume of 1833 was in nothing more remarkable than in its proof
of the many-sidedness of the author. He offered mediaeval romance,
and classical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and
domestic idyll, of which The May Queen is probably the most popular
example. The "mysterious being," conversant with "the spiritual
world," might have been expected to disdain topics well within the
range of Eliza Cook. He did not despise but elevated them, and
thereby did more to introduce himself to the wide English public than
he could have done by a century of Fatimas or Lotos-Eaters. On the
other hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely
be satisfied with pathos which in process of time has come to seem
"obvious." The pathos of early death in the prime of beauty is less
obvious in Homer, where Achilles is to be the victim, or in the
laments of the Anthology, where we only know that the dead bride or
maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her nature rather