BARON ALFRED VERE DE VERE.
BARON Alfred Vere de Vere,
Of me you win no new renown;
You thought to daze the country folk
And cockneys when you came to town.
See Wordsworth, Shelley, Cowper, Burns,
Withdraw in scorn, and sit retired!
The last of some six hundred Earls
Is not a place to be desired.
Baron Alfred Vere de Vere,
We thought you proud to bear your name,
Your pride is yet no mate for ours,
Too proud to think a title fame.
We hail the genius—not the lord:
We love the poet's truer charms.
A simple singer with his dreams
Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms.
Baron Alfred Vere de Vere,
I see you march, I hear you say,
"Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!"
Is all the burden of your lay.
We held you first without a peer,
And princely by your noble words words—
The Senior Wrangler of our bards
Is now the Wooden Spoon of lords.
Baron Alfred Vere de Vere,
You put strange memories in my head;
For just five decades now have flown
Since we all mourned young Arthur dead.
Oh, your wet eyes, your low replies!
Our tears have mingled with your tears:
To think that all such agony
Should end in making you a peer!
Baron Alfred Vere de Vere,
Our England has had poets too:
They sang some grand old songs of yore,
But never reached such heights as you.
Will Shakespeare was a prince of bards,
Our Milton was a king to hear,
But had their manners that repose
Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere?
Baron Alfred Vere de Vere,
Robe, now your bays are sere and spent:
The King of Snobs is at your door,
To trace your long (and deep) descent.
A man's a man for a' that,
And rich on forty pounds a year;
If rank be the true guinea-stamp
To win Parnassus—die a peer!
Trust me, Baron Vere de Vere,
When nobles eat their noblest words,
The grand old gardener and his wife
Smile at the airs of poet-lords.
Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
'Tis only noble to be good.
Plain souls are more than coronets,
And simple lives than Baronhood.
I know you, Baron Vere de Vere:
You pine among your halls and bays:
The jaded light of your vain eyes
Is wearied with the flood of praise.
In glowing fame, with boundless wealth,
But sickening of a vague disease,
You are so dead to simple things,
You needs must play such pranks as these.
Alfred, Alfred Vere de Vere,
If Time be heavy on your hands,
Are there no toilers in our streets,
Nor any poor in all these lands?
Oh! teach the weak to strive and hope,
Or teach the great to help the low,
Pray Heaven for a noble heart,
And let the foolish title go.
For the curious in such matters I give the following extract from the St. James's Gazette relating to Mr. Tennyson's lineage:—That Mr. Tennyson comes of an ancient house is generally known; not every one perhaps is aware of the number of princes, soldiers, and statesmen, famous in British or European history, from whom he can claim descent. Without pretending to give an exhaustive list of his royal and noble ancestors, it may be interesting at the present moment to point out a few of the more renowned among them. The Laureate's descent from John Savage, Earl Rivers (from which stock came Johnson's friend), implies descent from the Lady Anne, eldest sister of Edward IV., and so from sixteen English kings—namely, the first three Edwards, Henry III., John, the first two Henrys, William the Conqueror, Edmund Iron-side, Ethelred the Unready, Edgar the Peaceable, Edmund I., Edward the Elder, Alfred, Ethelwulf, and Egbert. But Edward III. was the son of Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair, King of France, who descended from Hugh Capet, and nine intervening French Kings, among whom were Robert II., Philip Augustus, Louis VIII., and St. Louis. The last is not the only saint who figures in this splendid pedigree. The mother of Edward II. was Eleanor, daughter of Ferdinand III., King of Castle and Leon, who was canonized by Clement X. Again, through the marriage of Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, with Isabel, daughter of Peter the Cruel, Mr. Tennyson descends from Sancho the Great and Alphonso the Wise. Other crowned ancestors of the poet are the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and several Kings of Scotland, notably Malcolm III. and the "gracious Duncan," his father. In truth, the Shakespearean gallery is crowded with portraits of his progenitors—e.g., besides those already mentioned, John of Gaunt, Edmund Mortimer Earl of March, Richard Earl of Cambridge, Richard Plantagenet "the Yeoman," Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, Lord Hastings (of the reigns of Edward IV. and Richard III.), and Lord Stanley. Mr. Tennyson is not only descended from the first Earl of Derby and that third earl with whose death, according to Camden, "the glory of hospitality seemed to fall asleep," but from the "stout Stanley" who fronted the right of the Scots at Flodden, and whose name in Scott's poem was the last on the lips of the dying Marmion. "Lord Marmion," says Scott, "is entirely a fictitious personage:" "but" he adds "that the family of Marmion, Lords of Fontenay in Normandy, was highly distinguished; Robert de Marmion, a follower of Duke William, having obtained a grant of the castle and town of Tamworth. This Robert's descendant, Avice, married John, Lord Grey of Rotherfield, one of the original Knights of the Garter, whose great-granddaughter became (in 1401) the wife of John, Lord D'Eyncourt, another ancestor of Mr. Tennyson's; whose uncle, the Right Honourable Charles Tennyson, many years Liberal member for Lambeth, assumed the name of D'Eyncourt by royal licence."
Probably the learned compiler of this abstruse genealogy has no time to study the poets, or he might have read of one who claimed an even more ancient descent:—
NOBLES and HERALDS, by your leave,
Here lies, what once was, MATTHEW PRIOR,
The son of ADAM and of EVE,
Can STUART or NASSAU claim higher?
The following beautiful lines, which occur in The Princess, have been the subject of many parodies:—
Home they brought her warrior dead;
She nor swoon'd nor utter'd cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
"She must weep or she will die."
Then they praised him soft and low,
Call'd him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.
Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept,
Took the face cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.
Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
"Sweet my child, I live for thee."
An excellent parody, by Shirley Brooks, appeared in Punch, December 30, 1865.