in Virgil, he adduced, rather strangely, the _cunctantem ramum_, said of the Golden Bough, in the Sixth Æneid. The choice is odd, because the Sibyl has just told Æneas that, if he be destined to pluck the branch of gold, _ipse volens facilisque sequetur_, “it will come off of its own accord,” like the sacred _ti_ branches of the Fijians, which bend down to be plucked for the Fire rite. Yet, when the predestined Æneas tries to pluck the bough of gold, it yields _reluctantly_ (_cunctantem_), contrary to what the Sibyl has foretold. Mr Conington, therefore, thought the phrase a slip on the part of Virgil. “People accused Virgil of plagiarising,” he said, “but if a man made it his own there was no harm in that (look at the great poets, Shakespeare included).” Tennyson, like Virgil, made much that was ancient his own; his verses are often, and purposefully, a mosaic of classical reminiscences. But he was vexed by the hunters after remote and unconscious resemblances, and far-fetched analogies between his lines and those of others. He complained that, if he said that the sun went down, a parallel was at once cited from Homer, or anybody else, and he used a very powerful phrase to condemn critics who detected such repetitions. “The moanings of the homeless sea,”—“moanings” from Horace, “homeless” from Shelley. “As if no one else had ever heard the sea moan except Horace!” Tennyson’s mixture of memory and forgetfulness was not so strange as that of Scott, and when he adapted from the Greek, Latin, or Italian, it was of set purpose, just as it was with Virgil. The beautiful lines comparing a girl’s eyes to bottom agates that seem to “Wave and float In crystal currents of clear running seas,” he invented while bathing in Wales. It was his habit, to note down in verse such similes from nature, and to use them when he found occasion. But the higher criticism, analysing the simile, detected elements from Shakespeare and from Beaumont and Fletcher. In June 1891 the poet went on a tour in Devonshire, and began his _Akbar_, and probably wrote _June Bracken and Heather_; or perhaps it was composed when “we often sat on the top of Blackdown to watch the sunset.” He wrote to Mr Kipling— “The oldest to the youngest singer That England bore” (to alter Mr Swinburne’s lines to Landor), praising his _Flag of England_. Mr Kipling replied as “the private to the general.” Early in 1892 _The Foresters_ was successfully produced at New York by Miss Ada Rehan, the music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the scenery from woodland designs by Whymper. Robin Hood (as we learn from Mark Twain) is a favourite hero with the youth of America. Mr Tom Sawyer himself took, in Mark Twain’s tale, the part of the bold outlaw. _The Death of Œnone_ was published in 1892, with the dedication to the Master of Balliol—