of conception and execution.

Mrs Tennyson, doubtless by her lord's desire, asked the Master (then
tutor of Balliol) to suggest themes. Old age was suggested, and is
treated in The Grandmother. Other topics were not handled. "I hold
most strongly," said the Master, "that it is the duty of every one
who has the good fortune to know a man of genius to do any trifling
service they can to lighten his work." To do every service in his
power to every man was the Master's life-long practice. He was not
much at home, his letters show, with Burns, to whom he seems to have
attributed John Anderson, my jo, John, while he tells an anecdote of
Burns composing Tam o' Shanter with emotional tears, which, if true
at all, is true of the making of To Mary in Heaven. If Burns wept
over Tam o' Shanter, the tears must have been tears of laughter.

The first four Idylls of the King were prepared for publication in
the spring of 1859; while Tennyson was at work also on Pelleas and
Ettarre, and the Tristram cycle. In autumn he went on a tour to
Lisbon with Mr F. T. Palgrave and Mr Craufurd Grove. Returning, he
fell eagerly to reading an early copy of Darwin's Origin of Species,
the crown of his own early speculations on the theory of evolution.
"Your theory does not make against Christianity?" he asked Darwin
later (1868), who replied, "No, certainly not." But Darwin has
stated the waverings of his own mind in contact with a topic too high
for a priori reasoning, and only to be approached, if at all, on the
strength of the scientific method applied to facts which science, so
far, neglects, or denies, or "explains away," rather than explains.

The Idylls, unlike Maud, were well received by the press, better by
the public, and best of all by friends like Thackeray, the Duke of