We have called him shy and sensitive in daily intercourse with strangers, and as to criticism, he freely confessed that a midge of dispraise could sting, while applause gave him little pleasure. Yet no poet altered his verses so much in obedience to censure unjustly 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 The same friend tells how well he took a rather fierce attack on an unpublished piece, when Mr Palgrave “owned that he could not find one good line in it.”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.