ingly, a rigorous censorship is maintained over the ethics of literature, with the rather melancholy result that we hear of little else. Trivialities have ceased to be trivial in a day of microscopic research, and there is no longer anything not worth consideration. We all remember what happened when Lord Tennyson wrote his "Hands all Round:"—
"First pledge our Queen, this solemn night,
Then drink to England, every guest."
It is by no means a ribald or rollicking song. On the contrary, there is something dutiful, as well as justifiable, in the serious injunction of its chorus:—
"Hands all round!
God the traitor's hope confound!
To this great cause of Freedom, drink, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round."
Yet such was the scandal given to the advocates of temperance by this patriotic poem, and so lamentable were the reproaches which ensued, that the "Saturday Review," playing for once the unwonted part of peacemaker, "soothed and sustained the agitated frame" of British sensitiveness by reminding her that the laureate had given no hint as to what
