But this is not the extract we promised our readers, nor the one we should select as the best illustration of our author's powers in this style. In a piece called _Walking to the Mail_, there occurs the following description of a certain college trick played on some miserly caitiff, who, no doubt, had richly deserved this application of _Lynch law_. It is not unlike the happiest manner of our old dramatists,--
"I was at school--a college in the south: There lived a flay-flint near; we stole his fruit, His hens, his eggs; but there was law for us; We paid in person. He had a sow, sir: she With meditative grunts of much content, Lay great with pig, wallowing in sun and mud. By night we dragg'd her to the college tower From her warm bed, and up the cork-screw stair, With hand and rope we haled the groaning sow, And on the leads we kept her till she pigg'd. Large range of prospect had the mother sow, And but for daily loss of one she lov'd, As one by one we took them--but for this, As never sow was higher in this world, Might have been happy: but what lot is pure? We took them all, till she was left alone Upon her tower, the Niobe of swine, And so returned unfarrow'd to her sty."
_The Princess; a Medley_, now claims our attention. This can no longer, perhaps, be regarded as a new publication, yet, being the latest of Mr Tennyson's, some account of it seems due from us. With what propriety he has entitled it "A Medley" is not fully seen till the whole of it has come before the reader; and it is at the close of the poem that the author, sympathising with that something of surprise which he is conscious of having excited, explains in part how he fell into that half-serious, half-bantering style, and that odd admixture of modern and mediæval times, of nineteenth century notions and chivalrous manners, which characterise it, and constitute it the medley that it is. Accident, it seems, must bear the blame, if blame there be. The poem grew, we are led to gather, from some chance sketch or momentary caprice. So we infer from the following lines,--
"Here closed our compound story, which at first, Perhaps, but meant to banter little maids With mock heroics and with parody; But slipt in some strange way, cross'd with burlesque From mock to earnest, even into tones Of tragic."----