and Maud, excel in passages rather than as wholes.

The hero of Maud, with his clandestine wooing of a girl of sixteen,
has this apology, that the match had been, as it were, predestined,
and desired by the mother of the lady. Still, the brother did not
ill to be angry; and the peevishness of the hero against the brother
and the parvenu lord and rival strikes a jarring note. In England,
at least, the general sentiment is opposed to this moody,
introspective kind of young man, of whom Tennyson is not to be
supposed to approve. We do not feel certain that his man and maid
were "ever ready to slander and steal." That seems to be part of his
jaundiced way of looking at everything and everybody. He has even a
bad word for the "man-god" of modern days, -


"The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain,
An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor."


Rien n'est sacre for this cynic, who thinks himself a Stoic. Thus
Maud was made to be unpopular with the author's countrymen, who
conceived a prejudice against Maud's lover, described by Tennyson as
"a morbid poetic soul, . . . an egotist with the makings of a cynic."
That he is "raised to sanity" (still in Tennyson's words) "by a pure
and holy love which elevates his whole nature," the world failed to
perceive, especially as the sanity was only a brief lucid interval,
tempered by hanging about the garden to meet a girl of sixteen,
unknown to her relations. Tennyson added that "different phases of