or irritatingly stated, yet in essence just. He readily rejected
some of his "Juvenilia" on Mr Palgrave's suggestion. The same friend
tells how well he took a rather fierce attack on an unpublished
piece, when Mr Palgrave "owned that he could not find one good line
in it." Very few poets, or even versifiers (fiercer they than poets
are), would have continued to show their virgin numbers to a friend
so candid, as Tennyson did. Perhaps most of the genus irritabile
will grant that spoken criticism, if unfavourable, somehow annoys and
stirs opposition in an author; probably because it confirms his own
suspicions about his work. Such criticism is almost invariably just.
But Campbell, when Rogers offered a correction, "bounced out of the
room, with a 'Hang it! I should like to see the man who would dare
to correct me.'"

Mr Jowett justly recognised in the life of Tennyson two circumstances
which made him other than, but for these, he would have been. He had
intended to do with the Arthurian subject what he never did, "in some
way or other to have represented in it the great religions of the
world. . . . It is a proof of Tennyson's genius that he should have
thus early grasped the great historical aspect of religion." His
intention was foiled, his early dream was broken, by the death of
Arthur Hallam, and by the coldness and contempt with which, at the
same period, his early poems were received.

Mr Jowett (who had a firm belief in the "great work") regretted the
change of plan as to the Arthurian topic, regretted it the more from
his own interest in the History of Religion. But we need not share
the regrets. The early plan for the Arthur (which Mr Jowett never
saw) has been published, and certainly the scheme could not have been
executed on these lines. {18} Moreover, as the Master observed, the