Browning, carmina desunt. Perhaps, too, a personal feeling, as if
Browning was Tennyson's rival, affected the judgment of the author of
Omar Khayyam. We may almost call him "the author."

The Holy Grail, with the smaller poems, such as Lucretius, was
published at the end of 1869. FitzGerald appears to have preferred
The Northern Farmer, "the substantial rough-spun nature I knew," to
all the visionary knights in the airy Quest. To compare "--"
(obviously Browning) with Tennyson, was "to compare an old Jew's
curiosity shop with the Phidian Marbles." Tennyson's poems "being
clear to the bottom as well as beautiful, do not seem to cockney eyes
so deep as muddy waters."

In November 1870 The Last Tournament was begun; it was finished in
May 1871. Conceivably the vulgar scandals of the last days of the
French Imperial regime may have influenced Tennyson's picture of the
corruption of Arthur's Court; but the Empire did not begin, like the
Round Table, with aspirations after the Ideal. In the autumn of the
year Tennyson entertained, and was entertained by, Mr Huxley. In
their ideas about ultimate things two men could not vary more widely,
but each delighted in the other's society. In the spring of 1872
Tennyson visited Paris and the ruins of the Louvre. He read Victor
Hugo, and Alfred de Musset, whose comedies he admired. The little
that we hear of his opinion of the other great poet runs to this
effect, "Victor Hugo is an unequal genius, sometimes sublime; he
reminds one that there is but one step between the sublime and the
ridiculous," but the example by which Tennyson illustrated this was
derived from one of the poet's novels. In these we meet not only the
sublime and the ridiculous, but passages which leave us in some
perplexity as to their true category. One would have expected Hugo's