thereabouts. Mr Harrison's sentence is, "But does In Memoriam teach
anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about that time" (the
time of writing was mainly 1833-1840) "common form with F. D.
Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr
Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter?"

The dates answer Mr Harrison. Jowett did not publish anything till
at least fifteen years after Tennyson wrote his poems on evolution
and belief. Dr Boyd Carpenter's works previous to 1840 are unknown
to bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a young parson at Cheltenham.
Ruskin had not published the first volume of Modern Painters. His
Oxford prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The
Duke of Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest,
except the contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in
the time of In Memoriam, Tennyson was "in touch with the ideas of
Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall"? {8} When Tennyson
wrote the parts of In Memoriam which deal with science, nobody beyond
their families and friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall.
They had not developed, much less had they published, their "general
ideas." Even in his journal of the Cruise of the Beagle Darwin's
ideas were religious, and he naively admired the works of God. It is
strange that Mr Harrison has based his criticism, and his theory of
Tennyson's want of originality, on what seems to be a historical
error. He cites parts of In Memoriam, and remarks, "No one can deny
that all this is exquisitely beautiful; that these eternal problems
have never been clad in such inimitable grace . . . But the train of
thought is essentially that with which ordinary English readers have
been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Ecce Homo,
Hypatia, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr Drummond, and many valiant
companies of Septem [why Septem?] contra Diabolum." One must keep