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"Who would not be The Laureate bold, With his butt of sherry To keep him merry, And nothing to do but pocket his gold?" But The Lay of the Lovelorn is a clumsy and rather vulgar skit on Locksley Hall a poem on which two such writers as Sir Theodore Martin and Professor Aytoun would have done well not to lay their sacrilegious hands.
'Yes, I did, he replied; 'I suppose it was Locksley, for he's about this evening, 'And I saw you, I continued, 'just at the moment the shot was fired, turn round the corner in the direction of Hallijohn's. 'So I did, he said, 'but only to strike into the wood, a few paces up. What's your drift? 'Did you not encounter Thorn, running from the cottage? I persisted.
"In the clout! in the clout! a Hubert for ever!" "Thou canst not mend that shot, Locksley," said the Prince, with an insulting smile. "I will notch his shaft for him, however," replied Locksley. And letting fly his arrow with a little more precaution than before, it lighted right upon that of his competitor, which it split to shivers.
He lit a cigar, took down a copy of Matthew Arnold's poems, opening at "Sohrab and Rustum," read it with a quick-beating heart, and then came to "Tristram and Iseult." In Tennyson, he had got no further than "Locksley Hall," which, he said, had a right tune and wrong words; and "Maud," which "was big in pathos." The story and the metre of "Tristram and Iseult" beat in his veins.
Mediaeval French, whether in poetry or prose, and the poetry of the "Pleiad" seems to have occupied little of his attention. Into the oriental literatures he dipped pretty deeply for his Akbar; and even his Locksley Hall owed something to Sir William Jones's version of "the old Arabian Moallakat." The debt appears to be infinitesimal.
Then was written, in rough bold characters, the words, "Le Noir Faineant". And, to conclude the whole, an arrow, neatly enough drawn, was described as the mark of the yeoman Locksley. The knights heard this uncommon document read from end to end, and then gazed upon each other in silent amazement, as being utterly at a loss to know what it could portend.
"Call me no longer Locksley, my Liege, but know me under the name, which, I fear, fame hath blown too widely not to have reached even your royal ears I am Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest." "King of Outlaws, and Prince of good fellows!" said the King, "who hath not heard a name that has been borne as far as Palestine?
Have you found me so very repulsive? Haven't you, on the contrary, found me rather sociable?" She folded her arms, and quietly looked at me for a moment, before answering. I shouldn't wonder if I blushed a little. "You want a compliment, Mr. Locksley; that's the long and short of it. I have not paid you a compliment since you have been here. How you must have suffered!
George Meredith beats the late Laureate hollow in this respect. He is second only to Shakespeare, who here, as elsewhere, maintains his supremacy. Mr. Hughes's remarks on Locksley Hall are, to use his own expression, amazing. Mr. Hughes forgets or does he forget? that in the sequel to this poem, entitled Sixty Years After, Tennyson unsays all the high-pitched dispraise of Amy and her squire.
Entirely different in spirit is another collection of poems called English Idyls, which began in the Poems of 1842, and which Tennyson intended should reflect the ideals of widely different types of English life. Of these varied poems, "Dora," "The Gardener's Daughter," "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall" and "Sir Galahad" are the best; but all are worthy of study.
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