With Peacock the history of English drinking-songs is practically closed, and it does not seem likely to be reopened in the immediate future. Any approach to the forbidden theme is met by an opposition too strenuous and universal to be lightly set aside. We may not love nor value books more than did our great-grandfathers, but we have grown to curiously overrate their moral influence, to fancy that the passions of men and women are freed or restrained by snatches of song, or the bits of conversation they read in novels. Accordingly, 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 liquor should be drunk in the cause of freedom, and that he probably had it in his mind to toast
“the great name of England, round and round,”