Mr Browning was a sufferer. To one young twitterer he replied in the usual way. The bard wrote acknowledging the letter, but asking for a definite criticism. “I do not think myself a Shakespeare or a Milton, but I _know_ I am better than Mr Coventry Patmore or Mr Austin Dobson.” Mr Browning tried to procrastinate: he was already deeply engaged with earlier arrivals of volumes of song. The poet was hurt, not angry; he had expected other things from Mr Browning: _he_ ought to know his duty to youth. At the intercession of a relation Mr Browning now did his best, and the minstrel, satisfied at last, repeated his conviction of his superiority to the authors of _The Angel in the House_ and _Beau Brocade_. Probably no man, not even Mr Gladstone, ever suffered so much from minstrels as Tennyson. He did not suffer them gladly. In 1846 the Poems reached their fourth edition. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (bitten by what fly who knows?) attacked Tennyson in _The New Timon_, a forgotten satire. We do not understand the ways of that generation. The cheap and spiteful _genre_ of satire, its forged morality, its sham indignation, its appeal to the ape-like passions, has gone out. Lytton had suffered many things (not in verse) from Jeames Yellowplush: I do not know that he hit back at Thackeray, but he “passed it on” to Thackeray’s old college companion. Tennyson, for once, replied (in _Punch_: the verses were sent thither by John Forster); the answer was one of magnificent contempt. But he soon decided that “The noblest answer unto such Is perfect stillness when they brawl.” Long afterwards the poet dedicated a work to the son of Lord Lytton. He replied to no more satirists. {50} Our difficulty, of course, is to conceive such an attack coming from a man of Lytton’s position and genius. He was no hungry hack, and could, and did, do infinitely better things than “stand in a false following” of Pope. Probably Lytton had a false idea that Tennyson was a rich man, a branch of his family being affluent, and so resented the little pension. The poet was so far from rich in 1846, and even after the publication of _The Princess_, that his marriage had still to be deferred for four years. On reading _The Princess_ afresh one is impressed, despite old familiarity, with the extraordinary influence of its beauty. Here are, indeed, the best words best placed, and that curious felicity of style which makes every line a marvel, and an eternal possession. It is as if Tennyson had taken the advice which Keats gave to Shelley, “Load every rift with ore.” To choose but one or two examples, how the purest and freshest impression of nature is re-created in mind and memory by the picture of Melissa with “All her thoughts as fair within her eyes, As bottom agates seen to wave and float In crystal currents of clear morning seas.”