And a guinea a line is better than a short "Italian Hymn."
"So, William, I thank you gladly; I think you meant to be kind;
And I will not heed the mob, whilst they'll very quickly find
The poems will read as well by a Lord as ever they did before,
And the publishers sell more copies, and more, and more, and more.
See how it reads for yourself, to be stuck up on every wall,
Lord Tennyson's Poems complete, in a specially printed Vol."
W.
The Nineteenth Century for November, 1881, contained a very uncomfortable kind of poem, by Tennyson, entitled "DESPAIR, a Dramatic Monologue." The argument of the poem was that "a man and his wife having lost faith in a God, and hope of a life to come, and being utterly miserable in this, resolve to end themselves by drowning. The woman is drowned, but the man is rescued by a minister of the sect he had abandoned."
The Fortnightly Review of the following month contained a parody which not only turned inside out the arguments of the original poem, but was so exquisitely worded as a burlesque that it was by many attributed to the pen of no less a poet than Mr. A. C. Swinburne.