you can get much real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is
irrational and which you don't take seriously: the practice seems to
be not unlike that mediæval one of keeping fools for your delectation.
Nor can the observations on Tennyson be said to be quite just or quite
pleasant. But every age and every individual is unjust to his or its
immediate predecessor--a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true
for all that. Then he "entangles himself in the study of accents"--it
would be difficult to find any adventurer who has _not_ entangled
himself in that study--and groans over "a frightful parcel of grammar
papers," which he only just "manages in time," apparently on the very
unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing
twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at
eleven o'clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical
attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W.
Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with
Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably.
Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy
over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official
etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose,
though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly
possible, though not likely, that he would be ejected for the part he
took. And his first five years' tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with
the delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition of which
he consoles himself (having heard both from the Vice-Chancellor and
others that there was to be "a great row") by reflecting that "it
doesn't much matter what he writes, as he shall not be heard." I do
not know whether the prediction was justified; but if so, the same
fate had, according to tradition, befallen his Newdigate some twenty
years earlier. In neither case can the "row" have had any personal
reference. Though his lectures were never largely attended by