In last Saturday's Times appeared a vigorous poem of the
rougher order, from the new Poet Laureate, on Dr. Jameson's raid, which will hardly tend to glorify that conception of British rule which his great predecessor made so famous,—as a rule "where faction seldom gathers head," but where "Freedom broadens slowly down from precedent to precedent." We can- not agree with most of our contemporaries, that the verses, in spite of their rather ostentatiously slovenly form, were without fire, but it was certainly not the kind of fire which we should like to see spreading over our Empire, for they were full, if not of sympathy for the rash defiance of law and duty, yet at
least of reluctance to pass any censure upon it. Sir Walter Scott used to reproach himself for always having more sym- pathy with his freebooters than with his more prudent heroes,' and Mr. Alfred Austin shows a rather more voluntary an& deliberate preference for the same kind of notion that corsairs and bandits have a romantic and attractive mission which poets do well to sing. Spirited as the poem is, in a rather spurious and melodramatic fashion, the verses do not make a very happy commencement of the career of a poetical interpreter of a constitutional monarch's mind.
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