also is as true in art as to history, and his vision of the fall and rise of England is a noble passage. In Aldwyth we have something of Vivien, with a grain of conscience, and the part of Edith Swan’s-neck has a restrained and classic pathos in contrast with the melancholy of Wulfnoth. The piece, as the poet said, is a “tragedy of doom,” of deepening and darkening omens, as in the _Odyssey_ and _Njal’s Saga_. The battle scene, with the choruses of the monks, makes a noble close. FitzGerald remained loyal, but it was to “a fairy Prince who came from other skies than these rainy ones,” and “the wretched critics,” as G. H. Lewes called them, seem to have been unfriendly. In fact (besides the innate wretchedness of all critics), they grudged the time and labour given to the drama, in an undramatic age. _Harold_ had not what FitzGerald called “the old champagne flavour” of the vintage of 1842. _Becket_ was begun in 1876, printed in 1879, and published in 1884. Before that date, in 1880, Tennyson produced one of the volumes of poetry which was more welcome than a play to most of his admirers. The intervening years passed in the Isle of Wight, at Aldworth, in town, and in summer tours, were of no marked biographical interest. The poet was close on three score and ten—he reached that limit in 1879. The days darkened around him, as darken they must: in the spring of 1879 he lost his favourite brother, himself a poet of original genius, Charles Tennyson Turner. In May of the same year he published _The Lover’s Tale_, which has been treated here among his earliest works. His hours, and (to some extent) his meals, were regulated by Sir Andrew Clark. He planted trees, walked, read, loitered in his garden, and kept up his old friendships, while he made that of the great Gordon. Compliments passed between him and Victor Hugo, who had entertained Lionel Tennyson in Paris, and wrote: “Je lis avec émotion vos vers superbes; c’est un reflet de gloire que vous m’envoyez.” Mr Matthew Arnold’s compliment was very like Mr Arnold’s humour: “Your father has been our most popular poet for over forty years, and I am of opinion that he fully deserves his reputation”: such was “Mat’s sublime waggery.” Tennyson heaped coals of fire on the other poet, bidding him, as he liked to be bidden, to write more poetry, not “prose things.” Tennyson lived much in the society of Browning and George Eliot, and made the acquaintance of Renan. In December 1879 Mr and Mrs Kendal produced _The Falcon_, which ran for sixty-seven nights; it is “an exquisite little poem in action,” as Fanny Kemble said. During a Continental tour Tennyson visited Catullus’s Sirmio: “here he made his _Frater Ave atque Vale_,” and the poet composed his beautiful salutation to the “Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago.”