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In short, as we understand the people around us much better by personal intercourse than by all the revelations of written words for words, as Tennyson says, "half reveal and half conceal the soul within," so the drama has, on the whole, infinitely more suggestions when it is well acted than when it is interpreted by the unaided judgment of the student.

To patriot and parent, to reformer and teacher, comes the inspiring thought that God garners in His memory every helpful act. No good influence is lost out of life. Are David and Dante dead? Are not Tennyson and Milton a thousandfold more alive to-day than when they walked this earth? Death does but multiply the single voice and strengthen it.

I think the sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight, has never been more greatly exalted than by Tennyson: As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry. As to this garden-character so much decried I confess that the "lawn" does not generally delight me, the word nor the thing.

The Waverley novels ran in a long, yellow line across one shelf; Dickens, clad in red, came immediately beneath; and a whole row of poets on the bottom shelf. Wordsworth was a prize from Fraulein, but his pages were still stiff and unread; Longfellow opened of himself at "Hiawatha"; while Tennyson, most beloved of all, held half a dozen markers at favourite passages.

Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from Tennyson and Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate friend, and he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet-Quaker and friend of Lamb. He published nothing till the second half of the century had opened, when Euphranor, written long before at Cambridge, or with reference to it, appeared.

I do not know why I was so long in reaching Tennyson, and I can only account for it by the fact that I was always reading rather the earlier than the later English poetry.

Instead of wasting artistic genius upon such small fry as premiers, diplomatists, and cabinet ministers, our cartoons will be caricatures of the pictures of Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Watts, Sandys, Whistler, Wilderspin: our letterpress will be Aristophanic parodies of Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne; game worth flying at, my boy!

Lady Franks sat at a large black Bechstein piano at one end of this vacant yellow state-room. She sat, a little plump elderly lady in black lace, for all the world like Queen Victoria in Max Beerbohm's drawing of Alfred Tennyson reading to her Victorian Majesty, with space before her. Arthur's wife was bending over some music in a remote corner of the big room.

Even, therefore, where this sentimental literature is first rate, as in passages of Byron, Tennyson, and Keats, it ought not to be ranked so high as the creative; and though perfection even in narrow fields is perhaps as rare as in the wider, and it may be as long before we have another "In Memoriam" as another "Guy Mannering," I unhesitatingly receive as a greater manifestation of power, the right invention of a few sentences spoken by Pleydell and Mannering across their supper-table, than the most tender and passionate melodies of the self-examining verse.

Why, even Wordsworth was well persuaded he could write like Shakespeare had he been so minded. Mr. Arnold remained all his life honestly indifferent to and sceptical about the fame of both Tennyson and Browning. Great living lawyers and doctors do not invariably idolize each other, nor do the lawyers and doctors in a small way of business always speak well of those in a big way.