for the particular evil of Mammon-worship.  Such it never was, even in the days when the Greek heroes longed for the booty of Troy, and anticipated lying by the wives of its princes and its citizens.  Still it had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and tendencies of the less sordid kind.  But one inevitable characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout, in all its particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of commercial enterprise.  There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it affords.  The political economy of war is now one of its most commanding aspects.  Every farthing, with the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes directly to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for waste or for destruction.  Apart from the fact that war destroys every rule of public thrift, and saps honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce, though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin.  It is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings, always introduces into trade.  In its moral operation it more resembles, perhaps, the finding of a new gold-field, than anything else.  Meantime, as the most wicked mothers do not kill their offspring from a taste for the practice in the abstract, but under the pressure of want, and as war always brings home want to a larger circle of the people than feel it in peace, we ask the hero of “Maud” to let us know whether war is more likely to reduce or to multiply the horrors which he denounces?  Will more babies be poisoned amidst comparative ease and plenty, or when, as before the fall of Napoleon, provisions were twice as dear as they now are, and wages not much more than half as high?  Romans and Carthaginians were pretty much given to war:  but no nations were more sedulous in the cult of Mammon.  Again, the Scriptures are pretty strong against Mammon-worship, but they do not recommend this original and peculiar cure.  Nay, once more:  what sad errors must have crept into the text of the prophet Isaiah when he is made to desire that our swords shall be converted into ploughshares, and our spears into pruning-hooks!  But we have this solid consolation after all, that Mr. Tennyson’s war poetry is not comparable to his poetry of peace.  Indeed he is not here successful at all:  the work, of a lower order than his, demands the abrupt force and the lyric fire which do not seem to be among his varied and brilliant gifts.  We say more.  Mr. Tennyson is too intimately and essentially the poet of the nineteenth century to separate himself from its leading characteristics, the progress of physical science and a vast commercial, mechanical,