three-farthings, or set it on your bookshelf so as to keep the damp away
from books of which you are not the Involuntary Bailee, but the unhappy
purchaser. The case becomes truly black, as we have said, when the
uncalled-for tribute has to be returned. Then it is sure to be lost,
when the lender writes to say he wishes to recover it. In future he will
go about telling people that the recipient stole his best ideas from the
manuscript (if it was a manuscript) which he pretends to have lost.

Lord Tennyson has suffered from all these troubles to an extent which the
average Bailee can only fancy by looking with his mind's eye through
"patent double million magnifiers." A man so eminent as the Laureate is
the butt of all the miserable minor poets, all the enthusiastic school-
girls, all the autograph-hunters, all the begging-letter writers, all the
ambitious young tragedians, and all the utterly unheard-of and imaginary
relations in Kamschatka or Vancouver's Island with whom the wide world
teems. Lord Tennyson has endured these people for some fifty years, and
now he takes a decided line. He will not answer their letters, nor
return their manuscripts.

Lord Tennyson is perfectly right to assume this attitude, only it makes
life even more hideous than of old to Mr. Browning and Mr. Swinburne.
Probably these distinguished writers are already sufficiently pestered by
the Mr. Tootses of this world, whose chief amusement is to address
epistles to persons of distinction. Mr. Toots was believed to answer his
own letters himself, but the beings who fill Lord Tennyson's, and Mr.
Gladstone's, and probably Mr. Browning's letterbox expect to receive
answers. Frightened away from Lord Tennyson's baronial portals, they
will now crowd thicker than ever round the gates of other poets who have
not yet announced that they will prove irresponsive. Cannot the Company
of Authors (if that be the correct style and title) take this matter up