Which might easily be taken for Tennyson's own.
Burns's verse was imitated by Tennyson, as it had been by Praed, and it is possible to find in Burns some lines that agree, not only in metre, but in mode of speech, in poetic energy, in resonant phrase, with the manner of Tennyson. I mean particularly the motto of The Holy Fair ('Hypocrisy à la mode'):—
A robe of seeming truth and trust
Hid crafty observation,
And secret hung with poison'd crust
The dirk of defamation;
A mask that like the gorget show'd
Dye-varying on the pigeon,
While for a mantle large and broad
He wrapt him in religion.
Tennyson uses this form in Will Waterproof and Amphion, and fills it in the same way with compressed significant language; making, in Will Waterproof, a small technical change (feminine rhyme in the second quatrain only), but otherwise keeping the old measure. There is no better example than the stanza into which he has put Will Waterproof's vision of the whole world, the
