“Beati! beati mortui.”

“The Lay of the Brown Rosary” is a charming but uneven piece, in four parts and a variety of measures, about a girl who, while awaiting her lover’s return from the war, learns in a dream that she must die, and purchases seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose body has been immured in an old convent wall.  The spirit gives the bride a brown rosary which she wears under her dress, but her kiss kills the bridegroom at the altar.  The most spirited and well-sustained of these ballad poems is “The Rime of the Duchess May,” in which the heroine rides off the battlements with her husband.  “Toll slowly,” runs the refrain.  Mrs. Browning employs some archaisms, such as chapelle, chambere, ladie.  The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have not quite the genuine accent of folk-song.

Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representatives in their separate spheres of anti-romantic tendencies, made occasional forays into the Middle Ages.  But who thinks of such things as “The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies” or “The Two Peacocks of Bedfont” when Hood is mentioned; and not rather of “The Bridge of Sighs” and “The Song of the Shirt”?  Or who, in spite of “Balder Dead” and “Tristram and Iseult,” would classify Arnold’s clean-cut, reserved, delicately intellectual work as romantic?  Hood was an artist of the terrible as well as of the comic; witness his “Last Man,” “Haunted House,” and “Dream of Eugene Aram.”  If he could have welded the two moods into a more intimate union, and applied them to legendary material, he might have been a great artist in mediaeval grotesque—­a species of Gothic Hoffman perhaps.  As it is, his one romantic success is the charming lyric “Fair Ines.”  His longer poems in this kind, in modifications of ottava rima or Spenserian stanza, show Keats’ influence very clearly.  The imagery is profuse, but too distinct and without the romantic chiaroscuro.  “The Water Lady” is a manifest imitation of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and employs the same somewhat unusual stanza form.  Hood—­incorrigible punster—­who had his jest at everything, jested at romance.  He wrote ballad parodies—­“The Knight and the Dragon,” etc.—­and an ironical “Lament for the Decline of Chivalry”: 

  “Well hast thou cried, departed Burke,
  All chivalrous romantic work
    Is ended now and past! 
  That iron age—­which some have thought
  Of mettle rather overwrought—­
    Is now all overcast.”

And finally, “The Saint’s Tragedy” (1848) of Charles Kingsley affords a case in which mediaeval biography is made the pretext for an assault upon mediaeval ideas.  It is a tendenz drama in five acts, founded upon the “Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,” as narrated by her contemporary, Dietrich the Thuringian.  Its militant Protestantism is such as might be predicted from Kingsley’s well-known resentment of the Romanist attitude towards