News of Literature.
--It would appear that Solomon spoke truth when he said that there was nothing new under the sun. Tennyson's famous "Charge of the Light Brigade" owes much of its popularity to its metre and mannerism. Except the sounds corresponding to the reiterated "six hundred," (such as blundered, thundered, wondered, sundered,) the rhymes are mean, and "cannon to right of them," "to left of them," "in front of them," are not rhymes at all. In the first stanza, as originally published, instead of "charge for the guns, he said," the line ran, "Take the guns! Nolan said." We suppose that as Nolan was only a subaltern, it was held, on second thought, that his name was not worthy of being preserved. Had he been a general, it might have been different, perhaps. Even the metre of Tennyson's lyric is not original. An English essay writer, in a volume just published in London by Stahan & Co., and entitled "Table Talk," quotes a verse from a ballad, "The Battalion of Agincourt," by Michael Drayton, and published in 1627, which shows from what source the form of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was derived. It runs thus: ‘ "They now to fight are gone,Armor on armor shone,
Drum now to drum did groan,
To hear was wonder--
That with the cries they make,
The very earth did shake,
Trumpet to trumpet spake--
Thunder to thunder!"
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